Mahindra Humanities Center: The 2009 - 2011 Report by Neal Akatsuka

IX XI

Mahindra Humanities Center | Harvard

T H E

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R E P O R T

The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard provides a locus for interdisciplinary discussions among faculty, other members of academia, students, and the public. T H E

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R E P O R T

The Center sponsors lectures, readings, conferences, workshops, and ongoing seminars on a wide range of topics. It also supports informal occasions for the exchange of ideas and the sharing of scholarly and artistic work.

The Center seeks to foster collaborations between the humanities, social sciences, and sciences in the belief that the humanities make a unique contribution in establishing—through interpretation and conversation— communities of interest and climates of opinion.

72 | FELLOWS 76 | INFORMATION 78 | STAFF & COMMITTEES

from the director In April 2011 the Humanities Center at Harvard changed its name to the Mahindra Humanities Center. Anand Mahindra, a graduate of Harvard College (’77) and an alumnus of Harvard Business School (’81), made an extraordinarily generous gift to the University with the purpose of providing the Humanities Center with an endowment. Proper names attached to institutions soon take on the role of place names or addresses, and it becomes easy, over time, to forget the personal narrative attached to the gift. As the narrative fades, the inspiration behind the gift is often lost for the generations that follow. “Mahindra” may someday become no more than an institutional title.

What’s in a name? A moving story of memory and gratitude.

Anand Mahindra’s gift represents his thankfulness to his late mother as well as to Harvard,

his alma mater. Indira Mahindra, who encouraged Anand to pursue the liberal arts, was deeply committed to the arts and humanities. Convinced of the rare power of the written word, she dedicated herself to writing novels and screenplays. With his mother’s support Anand applied to study film in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department but was unable to take up the place he was offered because of India’s foreign exchange regulations. Harvard came forward with a full scholarship despite the wealth of the Mahindra family. Anand’s gift to the Humanities Center, made thirty-eight years after he was admitted to the College, stands for the memory of his mother’s humanistic values while celebrating Harvard’s humane act in removing an obstacle between a young man and his dreams.

The Mahindra gift could not have come to the Humanities Center at a more appropriate

moment. The humanities find themselves in something of a double bind. The disciplines associated with the humanities—literature, philosophy, art history, the classics—are facing a troubling time in most parts of the world. Admissions are low, funding is tight, and there seems to be a gravitational pull towards economics, computer science, biology, engineering, and the professional disciplines. At the same time, the ethos of humanistic thought becomes ever more crucial in addressing ethical and cultural issues that accompany the growth of science and technology on a global scale. Today the humanities, the social and natural sciences, and the professional disciplines are more than ever in need of each other’s expertise and understanding. The most cutting-edge work in the biological sciences demands the guidance of ethicists; the professional schools open up new jurisdictions for themselves across the world that need to augment technical expertise with cultural and historical understanding; the study of literature and

history is enhanced by new hermeneutic horizons of digital technologies. These knowledge networks and intellectual intersections now potentially speak to a world audience on the internet that far exceeds any sense we may have of a campus community. Interdisciplinarity is only a convenient, perhaps clichéd, term used to draw attention to the fact that our “core” disciplines now bear a constellated, shifting relation to each other.

We humanists cannot afford to exhaust our intellectual ardor and our scholarly authority by

wallowing in the discourse of imminent “crisis.” If we do so, we risk undermining the vital contribution we make to the interdependence of contemporary systems of knowledge. When the humanities are diminished, all of higher education loses an elusive yet essential measure of slow, reflective “time”—a temporality of visions and revisions—that is crucial preparation for the exercise of public reason. “A public can only achieve enlightenment slowly,” Kant once wrote, in answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment?” And although the rush to technological immediacy and professional instrumentality are important signs of progress in the realms of knowledge, they are in danger of overwhelming our tolerance for the incremental and iterative time it takes to make sense of the humanities. The back and forth of open-ended conversations; the ongoing revision of critical dialogues; remembering, repeating and working through; interpretation, intervention, interlocution; the entangled practices of doubt and deliberation; the energy of aspiration; the suspension of judgment in the midst of the purposeful agencies of action and value: the humanities are, in this sense, projective and processual disciplines “rooted in the character of university education as neither a beginning, nor an end, but a middle.” This phrase—“rooted in the middle”—that deftly locates both the time and temper of the humanities

what’s in a name? a moving story of memory and gratitude.

comes from Michael Oakeshott’s provocative essay “The Idea of the University.” The spirit of a liberal education dwells in what he calls “the doctrine of the interim”: a state

of mind freed from the “burdensome distinction between work and play” laying itself open to “a world of ungracious fact [that has] melted into infinite possibility.”

History, memory, and the narrative of change are part of an institution’s intangible heritage.

They are in no way less significant than bricks and mortar. The Mahindra gift will contribute to the transformation of the humanities at Harvard because it has secured our future: it has, quite literally, provided us with the most precious of all gifts, time: time to think, to plan, to congregate, to confer, to experiment, to map the present, and to project our ideas into the future. This gift of time has turned us from being hostages to the future to becoming hosts who can throw open our doors to the rich possibilities that lie before us at Harvard and beyond.

HOMI BHABHA, DIRECTOR

...studying the humanities is â&#x20AC;&#x153;a ticket to freedom.â&#x20AC;? 4

FROM THE PRESIDENT

When Anand Mahindra was asked by the Hindustan Times why he had given such an extraordinary gift to support the humanities, he replied, “Conflict resolution and creating a better world do not come from an improved piece of software, or a better engine, or technology, but from people who can break free from their rigid points of view.” Reflecting on his own undergraduate experience at Harvard, he has described studying the humanities as “a ticket to freedom.”

We celebrate the freedom his gift will provide for so many

at Harvard: the freedom to explore together, to argue, to debate, to follow our curiosity, to ask questions that transport us beyond the immediate, to take the critical perspective, to see how the world has been and can be different. For he has chosen to give this gift to our remarkable Humanities Center—now the Mahindra Humanities Center—affording us a new sense of the possible, of the power of intellectual community, of the potential for inquiry beyond our own areas of deepest concern, to unite with other fields and disciplines, and to nurture our creativity.

DREW GILPIN FAUST PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND LINCOLN PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

inauguration Scenes from the Mahindra Humanities Center inaugural celebration. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Mahindra gift will contribute to the transformation of the humanities at Harvard because it has secured our future: it has, quite literally, provided us with the most precious of all gifts, time: time to think, to plan, to congregate, to confer, to experiment, to map the present, and to project our ideas into the future.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Homi Bhabha, Director

speakers 8

Aliyyah Abdur-

Eve Blau

Amanda Claybaugh

Rahman

Ana Blohm

Hollis Clayson

Emily Abel

Jean-Pierre Bobillot

Lizbeth Cohen

David Aberbach

Erika Boeckeler

Preston Scott Cohen

E.W. Adikaram

Peter Bol

David Cole

Gonzalo Aguilar

Sheila Bonde

Peter Cole

Kristján Ahronson

Constance Borde

Sarah Cole

Katerina Anghelaki-

Pietro Bortone

Michael Como

Rooke

Sugata Bose

James Conant

Nidal al Azraq

Bruno Bosteels

Tom Conley

Daniel Albright

Svetlana Boym

Rosemary Coombe

Daud Ali

Allan Brandt

Fred Cooper

Roger Allen

Brian Breed

Catherine Cornille

Charles Altieri

Lindsay Bremmer

Felipe Correa

Mary Anderson

Karen Britland

Nancy Cott

Nathanael Andrade

Dennis Britton

Patricia Crouch

Arjun Appadurai

Beat Brenk

Andrea Cucchiarelli

Angela A. Ards

Cynthia Brokaw

Brian Cummings

Oliver Lee Arce

Kimberly Juanita

Susan Dackerman

Isobel Armstrong

Brown

Nathalie Dajko

Elaine Auyoung

Benjamin Buchloh

Drew Dalton

Caroline Babcock

Randy L. Buckner

Nicholas Daly

Shrikant Bahulkar

Lawrence Buell

Françoise Dastur

Zsofia Ban

Jane Burbank

Arnold Davidson

Chris Barrett

Anne Burdick

Morgan Davies

Norton Batkin

Alex Byrne

Craig Davis

Jim Bauer

Daniela Cammack

Dominique de

Nancy Bauer

Jimena Canales

Courcelles

Ruth Bauer

John Caputo

Jonathan Decter

Ulrich Beck

Giorgio Caravale

Peter Der Manuelian

Sarah Beckwith

Bryan Carella

Thomas Derrah

Brigitte Bedos-

Christina Carlson

Robert Desjarlais

Rezak

Mary Wilson

Andrew Raffo Dewar

Jose Bellido

Carpenter

Ujala Dhaka

Eyal Ben-Eliyaha

Eric Cavallero

Spencer Di Scala

Melanie Benson

Mary Ann Caws

Cora Diamond

Eric Beerbohm

Christopher Celenza

Sviatoslav Dmitriev

Dominique Bertrand

Jana Cephas

Emily Dolan

Richard Beaudoin

Glenda Carpio

Andre Dombrowski

Jacqueline Bhabha

Anna Chahoud

Charles Donahue

Mario Biagioli

Juliette Cherbuliez

William Donaldson

Christian Biet

Gennaro Chierchia

Tobias Döring

Hélène Bilis

Tamara Chin

François Dosse

Ann Blair

Michele Ciliberto

Johanna Drucker

Jean-Vincent

Suzannah Clark

Stephen Drury

Blanchard

Norma Clarke

Helga Duncan

Douglas Duckworth

R. Marie Griffith

Sören Kaschke

Yaacob Dweck

Serge Gruzinski

Richard Kearney

Ronald Dworkin

Lani Guinier

Michael Kelly

Stefan Esders

Constanze

Sean Kelly

Maria Evangelatou

Güthenke

Thomas Kelly

James Faubion

Sylvaine Guyot

Robin Kelsey

Sarah Feldberg

Elaine Hadley

Randall Kennedy

Noah Feldman

Jeffrey Hamburger

Paize Keulemans

Jan Fergus

John Hamilton

Alexander Keyssar

Andreas Fischer

Evelyn Hammonds

Beverly Kienzle

Michael Fischer

Anne Hansen

Arthur Kinney

Finbarr Barry Flood

Karen Hansen

Adam Kirsch

Philippe Forest

Geoffrey Harpham

Alexander Kitroeff

Alex Forrester

Ellen Harris

Arthur Kleinman

Paul Franks

Paul Harrison

James Kloppenberg

Michael Frazer

Charles Hartman

Israel Knohl

Charles Fried

Hugh Haughton

Katrin Kogman-

Gregory Fried

Jonathan Hay

Appel

David Friedman

Renven Hazan

Christine M.

Andrea Fraser

Robert Hegel

Korsgaard

Duana Fullwiley

Julia Hejduk

Stephen Kosslyn

Ilia Galán

Stephan Heilen

Maria Koundoura

Marjorie Garber

Ursula Heise

Seth Koven

Gregg Gardner

Michael Heller

Mattias Kumm

Alexis Gelber

Daniel Heller-Roazen

Ursula Kunert

Nina Gerassi-

Stefan Helmreich

Erik Kwakkel

Navarro

Yves Hersant

Giuseppe La Bua

Valerie Gillies

Ralph Hexter

Alejandra Laera

William Gillies

Barbara Hillers

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

Gabriel Giorgi

Richard Holton

Chaitanya

Luis Girón-Negrón

Evan Horowitz

Lakkimsetti

Helidon Gjergji

Roy Horowitz

Ling Hon Lam

Tom Glick

Brian House

Douglas Lanier

Gary Gottlieb

David Howell

Adriaan Lanni

Mitchell Greenberg

Jerry Hunter

Sandra Laugier

Joshua Greene

Lewis Hyde

Maud Lavin

Jonas Grethlein

Steven Hyman

Amity Law

Inderpal Grewal

Nico Israel

Jonathan Lear

Eric Goldberg

Mary Jacobus

Mark Ledbury

Herbert Golder

Maya Jasanoff

Stephanie Leitch

Claire Goldstein

Bill Jones

Vincent Lépinay

Elon Goldstein

Nicholas Jose

Urs Leu

Khristina Gonzalez

Peniel Joseph

Caroline Levander

Dena Goodman

Stephanie Kameth

David Levin

Suzanne Gordon

Frances Kamm

Thomas Levin

Maria Gough

Brendan Kane

Sig Libowitz

speakers 10

Eng-Beng Lim

Ian Miller

Mario Filippo Pini

Jen Lin-Liu

Martha Minow

Diego Pirillo

Dana Lindaman

Helen Molesworth

Aglae Pizzone

Yukio Lippit

Miranda Mollendorf

Griselda Pollock

Sara Lipton

Christine Mollier

Daniel Pollack-

Julie Livingston

Anne Moore

Pelzner

Margaret Livingstone

Richard Moran

Murray Pomerance

Wasantha

Hugo Moreno

Marcos Porras

Amarakeerthi

Glyn Morgan

Hilary Poriss

Liyanage

Elizabeth Morrison

Robert Post

Michèle Longino

Mark Morrisson

Alain Pottage

Jeremy Lopez

Glenn Most

Gyan Prakash

Santiago Lopez-Rios

Mohsen Mostafavi

Todd Presner

Patricia Lovett

Paul Moyaert

Joseph Pucci

Tina Lu

Thomas Mullaney

Martin Puchner

Mark Ludwig

Erika Naginski

Steve Pyke

Peter Lunenfeld

Afsaneh Najmabadi

Paolo Quattrone

Ning Ma

Elisa New

Sarah A. Queen

Charles Maier

Thomas F.X. Noble

Nasser Rabbat

Clark Maines

Lin Nulman

Daniel Raff

Scott Maisano

Angela Nuovo

Atiq Rahimi

John Makransky

Josh Olivier-Mason

Sergio Ramírez

Harry F. Mallrgave

Carol Oja

Susan Rankin

Sheila Malovany-

Claudia Olk

William Rankin

Chevallier

Kelly O’Neill

Esther Rashkin

Marisa Mandabach

Julie Orlemanski

Jeffrey Ravel

Susan Mann

Julio Ortega

Alexander Rehding

Jane Mansbridge

Ryan Richard

Helmut Reimitz

Harvey Mansfield

Overbey

Marilyn Reizbaum

Greil Marcus

Guillermo Zermeño

Jaya Remond

Wayne Marshall

Padilla

Pedro Reyes

Thomas Mayer

John Palfrey

Hans-Joerg

Annie McClanahan

Amanda Palmer

Rheinberger

Michael McCormick

Orhan Pamuk

João Ribas

Linda McJannet

Katharine Park

Mark Richard

Ryan McKittrick

Robert Paul

Alan Richardson

Rory McTurk

Diane Paulus

Sarah Richardson

David Mechanic

Frank Pearl

Simon Richter

Rahul Mehrotra

James Penney

Alan Riding

Suketu Mehta

Peter Pesic

Peter Riegert

Eugenio Menegon

Julie Stone Peters

Wadda Ríos-Font

Dirk Meyer

Philip Pettit

Jennifer Roberts

Tobie Meyer-Fong

Siobhan Phillips

James Robson

Constantin

Antoine Picon

Amy Rodgers

Michaelides

Michèle Pierre-Louis

Freddie Rokem

Sara Miglietti

Joana Pimenta

Na’ama Rokem

Nancy Rosenblum

Kristel Smentek

Christina Wald

Charles Rosenberg

Matthew Wilson

Charles Waldheim

Sarah Ross

Smith

Andreas

Joshua Rothman

Theresa Smith

Victor Walser

Brian Rotman

Malcolm Smuts

Jonathan Walton

Arundhati Roy

Beate Soentgen

Sara Warner

Paul Russell

Werner Sollors

Nicholas Watson

Yulia Ryzhik

Diana Sorensen

Claudia Wedepohl

Sara Saba

Andrea Staiti

Tu Weiming

Irène Salas

Laurent Stalder

Joshua Weinstein

Michael Sandel

Randolph Stam

Liza Weinstein

Hashim Sarkis

Jason Stanyek

Nicolás Wey-Gómez

Steven Sater

Susan Staves

Ellen Widmer

Nitin Sawhney

Sita Steckel

Carolyn Williams

Thomas Scanlon

Carol Steiker

Flora Willson

Elaine Scarry

Claudia Stumpf

John Wiltshire

Talia Schaffer

Jeannie Suk

Christopher Wood

Jeffrey Schnapp

Madhavi Sunder

Ian Wood

Linda Schlossberg

Juan Pablo

Aaron Worth

Joseph B. Scholten

Sutherland

Jean Wyatt

Daniel Schrag

Patrick Sylvain

Tomiko Yoda

Christof Schuler

Paul Szarmach

Julia Young

Bruce Schulman

Katherine Tachau

Malika Zeghal

Rafi Segal

Abdellah Taia

Jan Zielonka

Allan Sekula

Nirvana Tanoukhi

Jan Ziolkowski

H. L. Seneviratne

Olga Taxidou

Noam Zohnr

Azade Seyhan

Gordon Teskey

Rebecca Zorach

Jesse Shapins

Richard Thomas

Adam Zucker

Teresa Shawcross

Karen Thornber

Lisa Zunshine

Stuart Shieber

Kim Thuy

Anne Shreffler

Xiaofei Tian

Debora K. Shuger

Judith Tick

Barbara Sicherman

Joan Tronto

Eve Sicular

Richard Tuck

Reva Siegel

Jane Tylus

Abel Sierra

Nomeda Urbonas

Stuart Sillars

Neil Van Leeuwen

Jorge Silvetti

Jasper van Putten

AbdouMaliq Simone

Mercedes Vaquero

James Simpson

Joanne

Lorna Simpson

Van Der Woude

Jyotsna Singh

Alain Viala

Susannah Sirkin

Martha Vicinus

Mariano Siskind

Jocelyn Viterna

Laurie Shannon

Detlef von Daniels

Mary Ann Smart

Alex Voorhoeve

The Center extends its gratitude and appreciation to President Drew Gilpin Faust, Provosts Steven Hyman and Alan Garber, Deans Michael Smith, Diana Sorensen, and Ingrid Monson, Anand Mahindra, Rita E. Hauser, Catherine C. Marron, Paul Buttenwieser, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for making our activities possible through their generosity and collaborative spirit.

events

C LO C KW I S E | TA N N E R L E C T U R E R S | J O N AT H A N L E A R | JA M E S S COT T

The Tanner Lectures are intended to advance and reflect upon scholarship and learning relating to human values across a broad range of fields. 14

Tanner Lectures The Tanner Lectures, established by the scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, are held at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Utah. They are intended to advance and reflect upon scholarship and learning relating to human values. Tanner lecturers may come from the humanities, sciences, creative arts, or from leadership in public or private affairs. Under the stewardship of the Mahindra Center, Harvard’s 2009 –10 Tanner Lectures were presented by Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, on “Irony and Identity”; Harvard’s 2010–11 Tanner Lectures were presented by James Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, on “Four Domestications: Fire, Plants, Animals and... Us.”

Norton Lectures The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts; past Norton Professors have included T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonard Bernstein, Czeslaw Milosz, John Cage, and Nadine Gordimer. The 2009–10 Norton Lectures, the first organized under the auspices of the Mahindra Center, were given by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk’s lectures, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, were published as a book by Harvard University Press in 2010.

NORTON PROFESSOR AND

N O B E L L AU R E AT E O R H A N PA M U K

Arts & Ideas In addition to hosting lectures and readings, we feature interactive formats for poets, novelists, playwrights, performers, artists, critics, and scholars to share their work with students, faculty, and the public. Partnerships with the American Repertory Theatre, the Harvard Book Store, and other cultural institutions have enabled the Mahindra Humanities Center to bring important writers, artists, and performers to campus and extend the work of the Center into the Cambridge and Boston communities.

The act of witnessing is to be caught between

a traumatic, projective past that will not die and a proleptic,

aspirational future that will not wait to be born. Somehow, in this awkward, belated place, artists must test their ethical and political faith and address our aesthetic beliefs. 19

CLOCKWISE | JAMES KLOPPENBERG | MICHAEL SANDEL | MARCUS+SOLLORS PANELISTS 20

The “20” Questions series pairs provocative authors with distinguished questioners from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

“20” Questions The “20” Questions series features discussions of provocative recent publications in a unique format. The author of the publication gives a brief presentation, and then five or six distinguished questioners— coming from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives—each poses one question. After the author has responded, the audience joins in the discussion. In 2009 –10, “20” Questions featured Greil Marcus (author and cultural critic) and Werner Sollors (Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature) discussing A New Literary History of America and Michael Sandel (Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government), discussing Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? In 2010–11, the series featured Charles Fried (Beneficial Professor of Law) and Gregory Fried (Professor of Philosophy, Suffolk University), discussing Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror and James Kloppenberg (Charles Warren Professor of American History), discussing Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition.

Master Classes Unlike our other programs which take long historical views or trace large thematic arcs, Master Classes provide an occasion to celebrate a meditative moment of genius: the genius of a complex, exemplary work slowly unfolding in the precise and passionate reading of a gifted interpreter. The “reader” attempts to catch the spirit of the work in a relatively short, shareable excerpt that allows for an exploration of the work’s fuller themes, forms, questions, and beliefs. There is an element of instruction and interpretation in Master Classes, but beyond those pedagogical aims, they allow for the pleasures of a slow and serious working-away at details of textual construction and attention that are often overlooked in broader and quicker surveys. In 2010–11, the series featured Richard Tuck (Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government), discussing Jeremy Bentham’s The White Bull; Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts), discussing François Boucher’s “Breakfast”; and Hugh Haughton (The University of York), discussing W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

Master Classes allow for the pleasures of

a slow and serious working-away at details often

overlooked in broader and quicker surveys.

C LO C KW I S E | E WA L A J E R - B U R C H A R T H | H U G H H AU G H TO N | R I C H A R D T U C K

The Church of Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Happening Now: New Art, New Artists brings visual artists working at the cutting edge of their medium to Harvard. The series is designed to introduce students and faculty to the most compelling artists of our time. Artists featured in this series included photographer Lorna Simpson, video maker Andrea Fraser, and photographer Allan Sekula. In each instance, the artists were paired with members of the faculty to foster dialog connecting the knowledge and experience produced in the visual arts with the perspectives of academic disciplines in the humanities.

CLOCKWISE | ANDREA FRASER | THE FORGOTTON SPACE, ALLAN SEKULA, BELOW

The Church of Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Happening Now: New Art, New Artists

The Church of Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Happening Now brings

visual artists working at the cutting edge of their medium

to Harvard. The series is designed to introduce students and faculty to the most compelling artists of our time.

C LO C KW I S E | R O N A L D DWO R K I N | M A R T H A M I N N OW | G UA N TA N A M O PA N E L I S T S

Legal Humanities In partnership with Harvard Law School, the Mahindra Center has organized a range of events under the rubric “Legal Humanities” that explore intersections between the law, literature, film, ethics, history, hermeneutics, and other areas of humanistic inquiry. Legal Humanities events in 2009 –10 and 2010 –11 included Jeannie Suk speaking on “The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds in Abortion Discourse”; “Guantanamo on Trial,” a screening and panel discussion of Sig Libowitz and Adam Rodgers’ film The Response; “After Brown, What Next?,” a conference to discuss Martha Minow’s book In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark; and Ronald Dworkin speaking on “Truth in Interpretation.”

Legal Humanities events explore intersections

between the law, literature, film, ethics,

history, hermeneutics, and other areas

of humanistic inquiry. 27

JOHN PALFREY | JEFFREY SCHNAPP

Through talks and workshops, Digital Humanities introduces innovative computing techniques for research and teaching in the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences. 28

Digital Humanities With the Initiative for Innovative Computing, the Mahindra Humanities Center sponsors talks and workshops on the “digital humanities” in an effort to introduce innovative computing techniques for research and teaching in the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences. Events have featured scholars from a wide range of disciplines— history, classics, art history, Tibetan and Buddhist studies, architecture, history of science—discussing their work with these and other technologies. Most recently, the Digital Humanities series sponsored a panel discussion with John Palfrey, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Prenser, and Jeffrey Schnapp, who examined new models for integrating the arts and humanities with information technology.

Medical Humanities The Mahindra Humanities Center sponsors events focused on the intersection of medicine and the humanities to address emerging issues within biomedicine that center on ethical, cultural, and humanistic aspects of health and disease, the body, and medical and scientific practices. The goal of this initiative is to bring together physicians, scientists, humanists, and interpretive social scientists to examine a series of critical questions about culture and values in the medical enterprise. In this respect, the initiative draws on a wide range of disciplines and perspectives to pursue new understandings of patient-healer relationships; interpersonal dynamics of caregiving; patterns of health and disease and their social determinants; and the meaning and impact of new medical technologies. A 2010 Medical Humanities symposium brought together scholars, researchers, and medical practitioners to discuss the topic of caregiving.

Bringing together physicians, scientists, humanists, and interpretive social scientists to examine a series of critical questions about culture and values in the medical enterprise.

CLOCKWISE | STEPHEN

DRURY | ALEXANDER REHDING | MARJORIE GARBER

Undergraduate Activities The Mahindra Humanities Center’s Undergraduate Advisory Committee organizes programs specifically tailored to Harvard College students and encourages undergraduates to participate in the full range of Center events. In 2009 –10, the committee organized a discussion on contemporary music, politics, and ethics with Stephen Drury (New England Conservatory), Alexander Rehding (Fanny Peabody Professor of Music), and Daniel Albright (Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature). In 2010–11, the committee organized two roundtable events with members of the faculty. Linda Schlossberg (Assistant Director of Studies for Women, Gender, and Sexuality) spoke on dystopian themes in young adult novels. Marjorie Garber (William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English) participated in an informal coffee hour in which students had the opportunity to pose questions about Professor Garber’s work.

Throughout the year, the Undergraduate Advisory Committee organizes discussions, roundtable events, and informal coffee hours with faculty that provide students with the opportunity to pose questions about their work. 33

Volkswagen Fellows’ Symposia

M A D E P O S S I B L E W I T H S U P P O R T F R O M T H E V O L K S WA G E N F O U N D AT I O N

Each year the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Volkswagen Foundation Fellows organize day-long symposia on topics related to their own research. These symposia cover a broad range of subjects and draw participants from various disciplines and geographic locations. The Volkswagen Fellowships’ rich contribution to Harvard’s intellectual life owes much to the creative international vision of the Volkswagen Foundation’s Secretary General, Wilhelm Krull. In 2009 –10, Detlef von Daniels organized a symposium on theories of the commonwealth; Christina Wald coordinated an event on early modern reformationists; and Andreas Fischer’s symposium explored cultural transfer in the Mediterranean during the fifth through ninth centuries. In 2010–11, Sita Steckel coordinated a symposium on the making of religion and Andreas Victor Walser organized an event on Greek citizenship in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

F R O M L E F T | M A R T I N LU T H E R | H AG I A S O P H I A , I S TA N B U L | M Y R R H B E A R E R

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, these

day-long symposia cover a broad range of subjects

and draw participants from various disciplines and geographic locations. 35

Mahindra Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Initiatives are made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

interdiscipli Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Soldiering: The Afterlife of a Modern Experience APRIL 22-23, 201 1

“Soldiering: The Afterlife of a Modern Experience” examined the demise of the soldier-citizen ideal and inquired into the changes that soldiering—one of the most central organizing experiences of modern life—underwent in the last half-century. Conference themes included technocratic and corporate conceptions of contemporary soldiering, the growing involvement of experts in planning and executing combat, and the roles played by civilian professionals—scientists, engineers, lawyers, ethicists, mental health professionals—in shaping the practice of warfare and the everyday realities of soldiers on the ground.

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, a leading scholar of Cold War military science and technology,

gave the keynote address on the phenomenology of war games and defense simulation, now pervasively used in the United States military. Political scientist and documentary filmmaker James Der Derian screened his latest film on the controversial United States military’s Human Terrain Systems program.

A “practitioners” roundtable with ex-soldiers, activists, and a military technology

developer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided a forum for discussing shared personal experiences and ideas. Students of anthropology, history, law, literature and political science spoke to a wide array of issues on panels titled “Sorting Soldiers from Civilians,” “Paramilitary Cultures,” and “Privatized Defense and Corporate Warfare.”

Each panel was matched with a faculty respondent, including Christopher Capozzola

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Devin Pendas (Boston College), Elaine Scarry (Harvard University), and Mary Steedly (Harvard University). The conversations that began at the conference are currently being turned into a publication.

inary Interdisciplinary Dissertation Workshops The Mahindra Humanities Center sponsors five new Interdisciplinary Dissertation Workshops every year. These interdisciplinary workshops, open to Harvard graduate students in all departments and programs, are intended to foster discussion of methodologies and practices in important areas of study that often cross departmental boundaries. While the workshops are especially focused on dissertation work, they include periodic discussion of general issues and questions. Harvard graduate students at all levels of study, from the first year of graduate school to the dissertation stage, are encouraged to attend.

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Hegel and Theory Faculty Director: Gordon Teskey (English and American Literature and Language) Graduate Student Coordinators: Matthew Ocheltree, Julie Orlemanski

Why should young humanities scholars read philosophy, and what kind of philosophy? The workshop focused on this question and others raised by Hegel’s texts, centrally the Phenomenology of Spirit, which through Alexandre Kojeve’s lectures in Paris, influenced almost all the continental literary theorists of the twentieth century.

Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Study of Religion Faculty Directors: Mahzarin Banaji (Psychology), Elizabeth Spelke (Psychology) Graduate Student Coordinator: Larisa Heiphetz

Relevant to several graduate programs—including history, philosophy, psychology, law, religion, and sociology, as well as the Divinity School and the Kennedy School—this workshop brought together faculty and graduate students from across the university to engage in critical discussions of scholarship about religion, particularly religion as a social force in contemporary culture.

Islam in the West Faculty Directors: Ali Asani (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), Jocelyne Cesari (Middle Eastern Studies) Graduate Student Coordinator: Abraham Zamcheck

A primary objective of this workshop was to connect students from a number of departments and schools around issues of common interest examined from an interdisciplinary perspective. Participants worked with faculty from across the United States, which afforded the students the opportunity to receive feedback and guidance on their research from a diverse array of scholars.

Research Workshop in Political Theory Faculty Directors: Michael Frazer (Government; Social Studies), Dennis Thompson (Government; Harvard Kennedy School) Graduate Student Coordinator: Sabeel Rahman

The workshop brought together graduate students and faculty working in political theory for intensive discussion of student research. The workshop also convened a graduate student conference in political theory.

South Asia across Disciplines Faculty Directors: Asad Ahmed (Anthropology), Smita Lahiri (Anthropology), Parimal Patil (Study of Religion; Sanskrit and Indian Studies) Graduate Student Coordinators: Daniel Majchrowicz, Dinyar Patel

Meetings were organized around participants’ shared interests in matters such as languages and publics, intellectual and embodied practices, citizenship and belonging, cultural production and identity, and social movements and the law in South Asia. The aim was to develop and enrich participants’ scholarship through discussions of works in progress and visits by guest speakers.

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Hegel and Anti-Hegel Faculty Directors: Julie Orlemanski (Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard), Gordon Teskey (English) Graduate Student Coordinators: William Baldwin, Steve Hequembourg

What is the ongoing force of Hegel’s thought? Can there be philosophical grounds for the study of literature? Can there be method in literary study or in other humanistic scholarship? Does the radical style of Hegel’s dialectical thinking undermine or enable secure knowledge with respect to the arts? These questions guided our reading in the work of Hegel and post-Hegelian European thinkers, e.g., Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, and Agamben.

Sensing the Body Faculty Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Anthropology), Arthur Kleinman (Anthropology) Graduate Student Coordinators: Andy McDowell, Julia Yezbick

The workshop provided a forum for participants from an array of social science and humanities backgrounds to engage in theoretical and methodological discussions considering the senses and the body. Topics of discussion included memory, food, material culture, medicalized bodies, gender, space, phenomenology, and media.

Thinking with Technology Faculty Directors: Stephen Greenblatt (English), Leah Price (English) Graduate Student Coordinators: Suparna Roychoudhury

With new digital technologies emerging every day, and with the role of technology in academia likely to grow in coming years, it is important for humanities scholars to be able to navigate the world of the “digital humanities.” This workshop offered a forum for students and faculty to practice “thinking with technology”—where, by “technology,” we included the range of professional research and pedagogical instruments on offer, as well as the many popular tools that are rapidly altering how we learn, think, and collaborate.

Workshop in Cross-Cultural Philosophy Faculty Directors: Khaled El-Rouayheb (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), Parimal Patil (Study of Religion), Michael Puett (East Asian Languages and Civilizations) Graduate Student Coordinators: Michael Allen, Lydia Porter

This workshop provided a forum for the discussion of ongoing research in the study of philosophy across historical periods and cultural traditions. Our meetings brought together faculty and students from several departments, including Religion, Sanskrit and Indian Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Philosophy with shared interests in comparative logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, etcetera.

Workshop in International Relations Faculty Director: Dustin Tingley (Government) Graduate Student Coordinator: Richard Nielsen

The workshop covered topics related to both security and international political economy. Participants met for two hours each week for graduate students and faculty to present their work for discussion.

New Faculty Lunches The generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation enabled the Mahindra Humanities Center to organize a series of Thursday gatherings at which new members of the Harvard faculty present their work and get to know colleagues from a wide range of fields. Lively conversations rather than formal lectures, these lunches have helped build intellectual communities beyond departments and disciplines. 2 0 0 9 –1 0

Kelly O’Neill History

Joshua Greene Psychology

Eric Beerbohm Government; Social Studies

Gennaro Chierchia Linguistics

Suzannah Clark Music

Joanne Van Der Woude English; History and Literature

James Robson East Asian Languages and Civilizations

R. Marie Griffith Divinity School

Julie Stone Peters English; Comparative Literature

Duana Fullwiley Anthropology; African and African-American Studies

Sylvaine Guyot Romance Languages and Literatures

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Jocelyn Viterna Sociology

Peter Der Manuelian Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

David Howell East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Amanda Claybaugh English

Jonathan Walton Harvard Divinity School

Martin Puchner English

Tomiko Yoda East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Mark Richard Philosophy

Malika Zeghal Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Maria Gough History of Art and Architecture

Ian Miller History

seminars The seminar program has been a core activity of the Mahindra Humanities Center since its founding as the Center for Literary Studies in 1984. Ranging widely across disciplines, methodologies, and time periods, the seminars serve a broad constituency of faculty and graduate students at Harvard and throughout the region.

seminars

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Architecture and Knowledge CHAIRS: MICHAEL HAYS (2010-11), ALINA PAYNE, ANTOINE PICONE (2009-10)

In the years 2009 –11 the Architecture and Knowledge seminar brought together scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as from Switzerland, Italy, and Holland. Presentations focused on topics as varied as architecture and neuroscience, the sublime in architecture, mechanical systems in the age of ecological awareness, and architecture and film. Other seminar meetings explored Italian modernism between the wars and architectural representation as mapping in the early modern period. Particularly topical were the presentations of guests who addressed the architecture of Giorgio Vasari on the occasion of his 500th anniversary (anticipating an exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence) and American urban/suburban strategies in Boston in the 1960s.

Buddhist Studies Forum CHAIR: JANET GYATSO

Over the past two years the Buddhist Studies Forum has continued to provide students, faculty, and participants with opportunities to explore various perspectives on Buddhist studies, presenting twenty lectures over the course of 200 9–11. Lectures featured scholars from India, Sri Lanka, Canada, and universities across the United States and included presentations from such diverse areas as ritual studies, historical and cultural analysis, anthropology, and art history. To mention just a few of the many highlights, Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College) spoke about the diverse ritual practices by which Yolmo Valley Nepalese Buddhists navigate the emotional and intellectual challenges of death and dying. Daud Ali (University of Pennsylvania) demonstrated how religion and court life intersect in the realm of ethics within a medieval Buddhist Kamasutra text. Wasantha Amarakeerthi Liyanage (University of Peradeniya) directed our attention to the works and thought of one of Sri Lanka’s most influential and controversial Buddhist reformers and thinkers, E.W. Adikaram, to illustrate complex processes of cultural change in modern Buddhist Sri Lanka. James Robson (Harvard University) introduced us to the historical connections between monasticism and various forms of mental health therapy centered around a particular monastery in Iwakura, Japan. In addition to hosting lecturers, the seminar continues to greatly benefit from the attendance and participation of a diverse body of students, faculty members, local scholars, and members of the community.

CHAIRS: CATHERINE MCKENNA, TOMÁS Ó CATHASAIGH

In 2009 –11, the seminar offered a program covering most of the Celtic languages and their literatures, in periods ranging from the eighth century to the present. Our speakers brought the perspectives of archaeology, history, linguistics, and classics, as well as literary scholarship. Paul Russell (University of Cambridge) offered a close reading of a ninth-century Welsh poem, Valerie Gillies (Harvard University) spoke about holy wells in contemporary Scotland and the poems she has written about them. Several speakers focused on particular manuscripts, including talks by Morgan Davies (Colgate University) and William Gillies (Edinburgh University) on the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Kristján Ahronson (Bangor University) analyzed the epidemiology of the spread of a particular style of Christian monument in the early medieval Gaelic world, while Jerry Hunter (Bangor University), Brendan Kane (University of Connecticut), and Eva Guillorel (University of Rennes) talked about Celtic lands in the early modern period: Hunter focused on popular drama in Wales; Kane spoke about reversing the colonial gaze to describe Irish attitudes toward London; and Guillorel used the Dastum database of oral tradition to shed new light on Breton attitudes toward the Ancien Régime. Several speakers reached across traditional disciplinary boundaries: Rory McTurk (University of Leeds) examined Irish elements in an Old Norse saga; Craig Davis (Smith College) analyzed Celtic themes in Beowulf; Bryan Carella (Assumption College) spoke about the New Testament and early Irish legal thought; and Bill Jones (Cardiff University) presented on immigrant letters from America to Wales.

China Humanities CHAIRS: WAI-YEE LI (2009-10), JAMES ROBSON (2010-11)

The China Humanities seminar convenes as a bi-weekly lecture series exploring the whole span of Chinese experience during the pre-modern era. Over the past two years, the seminar has hosted seventeen different speakers, drawing from the intellectual community

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Celtic Literature and Culture

The China Humanities bi-weekly lecture series hosted seventeen different speakers, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

at Harvard, and also extending invitations to scholars from other institutions, both domestic and international. Speakers presented a variety of disciplinary perspectives: literature, history, philosophy, religion, and art history, among other fields. Seminar participants examined the historical and literary development of the Chinese vernacular novel with Robert Hegel (Washington University, St. Louis); discovered the cultural import of dicing games in Ming China with Tina Lu (Yale University); and scrutinized the pairing of Daoist and Buddhist sculptural iconography found in Tang religious sites in Sichuan with Christine Mollier (Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique). The historical periods treated in the seminar have been equally diverse and cover the entire breadth of imperial China, ranging from a presentation by Dirk Meyer (Oxford University) on the philosophical hermeneutics of a bamboo-strip manuscript dating to the formative Warring States period, to an analysis of nineteenth-century poetry on foreign travel by Tian Xiaofei (Harvard University), and an investigation by Thomas Mullaney (Stanford University) of Chinese typewriting as a lens for viewing China’s transition into a linguistic modernity.

Civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome CHAIRS: DAVID ELMER (2010-11), RICHARD THOMAS, FRANCESCA SCHIRONI (2009-10)

The seminar on Civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome provides a forum for pioneering explorations of the literature, culture, and legacies of classical antiquity. Over the past two years, nine scholars of international standing have presented innovative research on subjects ranging from early Roman satire to late medieval astrological poetry. Speakers often challenged old orthodoxies and established approaches. Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), for instance, charged Plato with fabricating the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy that he invokes in the Republic, while Jonas Grethlein (RuprechtKarls-Universität, Heidelberg) argued for a rereading of Xenophon’s Anabasis grounded in the contemporary philosophy of history. Two distinguished scholars from the University of Rome, Andrea Cucchiarelli and Giuseppe La Bua, interrogated the complex interrelationship between literary practice and politics in the Augustan age. Others traveled shorter distances to present the results of their latest research: Brian Breed (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) spoke on the representation of literary history in Horace’s Satires and Adriaan Lanni (Harvard Law School) outlined a new approach to the expressive function of Athenian law.

Classical Traditions CHAIRS: CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON, CHRISTOPHER KREBS

The Classical Traditions seminar broadened its scope these last two years to include the visual arts and music, while it continued to explore how philology and hermeneutics shape the appropriation of the Greek and Roman legacies. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University) spoke about Pythagorean harmonics and cosmology; Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg Institute, London) discussed Aby Warburg´s idiosyncratic early twentieth-century “Picture-Atlas;” and Herbert Golder (Boston University) discussed his collaborations with Werner Herzog on a film adapting a Greek tragedy. More traditionally (but with no less innovation), Christopher Celenza (American Academy in Rome) discussed how Lorenzo Valla’s scriptural hermeneutics was shaped by Italian humanism; Constanze Güthenke (Princeton University) reassessed Wilamowitz’s Plato; and John Hamilton (Harvard University) meditated on the many often-conflicting meanings of “securitas.” Finally, to celebrate two encyclopedic efforts in understanding a central current of the classical traditions, the seminar convened a special panel that focused on The Virgilian Tradition and the Virgil Encyclopedia (forthcoming). Papers by Luis Girón-Negrón (Harvard University), Stephanie Kamath (University of Massachusetts, Boston), Barbara Hillers (Harvard University), Richard Thomas (Harvard University), and Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard University) presented significant slivers of these monumental projects.

NEUROLOGY | JAMES HENRY | VIRGIL

Cognitive Theory and the Arts CHAIRS: ANNA HENCHMAN, ALAN RICHARDSON, ELAINE SCARRY

The problem of imagining other minds—in literature, in everyday life, and in clinical practice – was addressed by several speakers. Lisa Zunshine (University of Kentucky) argued that an insatiable hunger for thinking about other minds lies behind all cultural activity. Joshua Rothman (Harvard University) focused on the boundaries we map between conscious and unconscious matter, ourselves and others, and life and death. The problem of comprehending, describing, and even categorizing other minds was the subject of Harvard Provost and neurobiologist Steven Hyman’s lecture about the challenges of defining mental illness and the need to revise the diagnostic manual (DSM-5) to accommodate recent findings in neuroscience. Several speakers explored the problem of knowing our own minds. Philosopher Neil van Leeuwen (Tufts University) discussed the relationship between pretending and self-deception. Philosopher Richard Holton (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) spoke about the sometimes misleading feeling that we have the free will to control our own behavior. Joshua Greene (Harvard University), emphasizing the surprising importance of the amygdala in moral judgments, addressed psychology’s findings about the roles emotion and reason play in moral decisionmaking. Literary scholar Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck College) differentiated William and Henry James’ ideas about the self and intersubjective consciousness in Principles of Psychology and The Golden Bowl. As in the past, the nature of the imagination was a prominent focus. Alan Richardson (Boston College) discussed neuroscience’s recent fascination with the workings of the imagination and the flexibility of the fantasy-prone human mind. Steven Kosslyn (Harvard University), who has been for many decades a leading describer of the image-making power of the mind, described our ability to build up images, and then inspect or transform them. Literary critic Elaine Auyoung (Harvard University) investigated the techniques novelists use to create fictional worlds based on limited sensory cues, as when the sound of a child yawning in the next room incites a picture of the child itself. The interplay between imagining, perceiving, forecasting, and mental modeling was addressed by speakers from the disciplines of medicine, psychology, philosophy, and music. Neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone (Harvard Medical School) focused on facial recognition in the visual arts and daily life. Randy Buckner (Harvard University) discussed default states of consciousness—the internal workings of the mind when it is not focused on a concrete task. Alex Byrne (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) compared episodic memory to imagination and direct perception. Peter Pesic (St. John’s College) spoke about single-line melody, harmony, polyphony, and the nature of the mind when it is doing many things at once.

Cultural And Humanitarian Agents CHAIRS: JENNIFER LEANING, DORIS SOMMER, MICHAEL VAN ROOYEN

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Cultural Agents Initiative partnered to create this seminar with the purpose of promoting open dialogue and providing a setting where creativity and expression flourish. These initiatives continue to demonstrate the limitless approaches to using art and humanities in humanitarian relief situations. Over the past two years the Cultural and Humanitarian Agents seminar hosted a series of lectures featuring: Nidal al Azraq (author) and Nitin Sawhney (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on media arts and literacy programs with youth in refugee camps in the West Bank; Atem Aleu (artist) on art workshops at the United Nations Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya; Neal Baer (pediatrician) on youth filmmaking; Ildiko De Tesak (lawyer) on promoting socioeconomic development in rural Salvador through education and the arts; Ana Blohm (physician and photographer) on the role of photography in doctor-patient relationships; and Pedro Reyes (artist) on a project in Mexico City in which guns were melted down and formed into shovels for planting trees. Marcos Porras and Oliver Lee Arce (both graphic novel artists) spoke about their efforts to create alternatives to youth drug use by working with young people on the development of critical thinking skills and imagination. Frank Pearl (former High Commissioner for Peace and Reintegration, Colombia) reported on Colombian artsbased programs created to support the reintegration processes for demobilized combatants from paramilitary and guerrilla groups. Finally, Gustavo Buntinx (art historian, critic, and curator, Peru) examined art as a tool for healing during the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos.

CLOCKWISE | ANA BLOHM | GOETHE | PEDRO REYES, PISTOLS INTO SPADES

Seminars on literature and culture in the eighteenth century were expansive in discipline, geography, and approach.

Eighteenth-Century Studies CHAIRS: SUSAN LANSER, RUTH PERRY

The 2009 –11 seminars on literature and culture in the eighteenth century were expansive in discipline, geography, and approach. Fall 2009 was devoted to the theme of musical cultures of the eighteenth century, in which William Donaldson (Open University) spoke about continental influences on “traditional” Scottish music in cosmopolitan Edinburgh; Ellen Harris (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) explored philanthropic performances of Handel’s oratorios; Emily Dolan (University of Pennsylvania) illuminated Haydn’s innovative orchestral arrangements; and Susan Staves (Brandeis University) considered implications of the aristocratic harpsichord for republican America. Several seminars explored the material conditions of artistic production: Dena Goodman (University of Michigan) discussed the ways in which ancien régime women’s letter-writing encompassed both textual content and the materiality of desks and quills; Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) investigated Asian influences on French porcelain; and Jan Fergus (Lehigh University) showed how Midland booksellers’ records of poetry sales challenge claims about the effects of copyright. A roundtable on eighteenth-century London featured presentations by Jane Kamensky (Brandeis University), Rachel Ramsay (Assumption College), Carol Flynn (Tufts University), and Cynthia Johnson (Cary Memorial Library). Spring 2011 sessions highlighted diverse frameworks for literary scholarship: Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania) spoke about coded attitudes towards gender during the Goethezeit; John Wiltshire (LaTrobe University) looked at Samuel Johnson’s engagements with women writers; Norma Clarke (Kingston University) explored the career of John Carteret Pilkington, son of the notorious Laetitia; and John Bender (Stanford University) advanced a theory of rational love choice in Les Liaisons dangereuses.

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The France and the World seminar celebrated the diversity of thoughts, styles, and geographies—in lectures by Haitian writer Patrick Sylvain, Haitian ex-Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis, and Franciska Louwagie (Université de Louvain), respectively— and disciplines—Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University) on Alain Badiou and Marxism. Seminar sessions shared the perspective that, from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, language and aesthetics have contributed to our reassessment of an understanding of the human condition through emphasis on continuity, change, and rupture. These themes were poignantly illustrated by the colloquia on Renaissance women and “The Classical Eye,” as well as a lecture by Dana Lindaman (Harvard University) on Jules Verne. Nathalie Dajko (Tulane University) described how cataclysmic events are at the root of sociolinguistic shifts in Louisiana and Bayou country today. François Dosse (Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres de l’Académie de Créteil) offered insight into the monumental intellectual collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Writers Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier presented their new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. Several lectures addressed the continuing influence of French aesthetics and poetics. While Philippe Forest (Université de Nantes) revealed aspects of the integration of Japanese literature into French modern aesthetic practices, Michael Kelly (University of Limerick) showed how, in the contemporary French context, poetics and poetic subjects were notions as shifty as language itself. Acoustic poet and theoretician Jean-Pierre Bobillot offered a performance, as well as an historical account of sound poetry in France. Finally, a multiracial, multinational, and intergenerational roster of speakers who write in French, a language that is often not their own, truly helped expand on the topic of this seminar—global French. Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia gave an account of his autobiographical novel L’Armée du salut, in which he presented memory as transgression—as an object breaking social taboos to reclaim his negated individuality. Afghan novelist Atiq Rahimi spoke about choosing to write in French instead of his native Persian, explaining that it freed him of any temptation to practice self-censorship. Lastly, Kim Thuy (Quebec Delegation in Boston) discussed her first novel Ru through tales of survival, real and imagined, in order to show both the impossibility and the necessity of writing.

CHAIRS: VERENA CONLEY, MYLÈNE PRIAM

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France and the World

A multiracial, multinational, and intergenerational roster of speakers truly helped expand on the topic of â&#x20AC;&#x153;global French.â&#x20AC;?

Gender and Sexuality CHAIRS: JOYCE ANTLER (2009-10), ROBIN BERNSTEIN (2009-10), JYOTI PURI (2010-11), LINDA SCHLOSSBERG (2010-11)

In the 2009 –10 academic year, the Gender and Sexuality seminar hosted lectures of tremendous geographic range: Caroline Levander (Rice University) discussed gender in hemispheric American Studies, while Afsaneh Najmabadi (Harvard University) shared her research on homosexuality in the Middle East. The seminar juxtaposed consideration of imagined spaces with physical geographies: Sara Warner (Cornell University) analyzed the “affective cartography” of the “Lesbian Nation”; Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman (Brandeis University) explored “post-racial America”; and Karen Hansen (Brandeis University) and Grey Osterud (independent scholar) shared their research on the meanings of physical land to rural women in the United States. The 2010 –11 seminar series began with Kimberly Juanita Brown (Northeastern University) sharing her critique of visual representations of slavery and black women, while turning attention to the work of black women photographers who use self-portraiture to challenge such visual histories. Independent historian and filmmaker Eve Sicular gave an informative and engaging presentation on queer readings of diasporic Yiddish films. Sarah Richardson (Harvard University) spoke on the emergent discourses of sex differences in human genome research. Renowned feminist scholar Inderpal Grewal (Yale University) critically analyzed how Western and postcolonial feminists “outsource” patriarchy through discourses of honor killings. Eng-Beng Lim (Brown University) engaged in a queer analysis of the now familiar dyad of white men and native “boys” as it is reproduced and undermined within diasporic Asian visual representations. Chaitanya Lakimsetti (Harvard University) ended the year with a presentation examining why sex workers in India think of HIV as their “friend,” while underscoring the dynamics of biopower and state regulation of prostitution in contemporary India.

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Hispanic Cultures CHAIRS: BRAD EPPS, LUIS GIRÓN, MARIANO SISKIND (2010-11)

Over the past two academic years Hispanic Cultures hosted 14 sessions on a range of topics spanning the Hispanic and Portuguese speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic and from the Middle Ages through the present. The sessions were conducted in Spanish and English and led by international scholars from Argentina, Cuba, Chile, Spain, Nicaragua, Perú, and the United States. Themes were wide-ranging yet fully representative of active fields of scholarly research in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian fields. Mercedes Vaquero (Brown University) shared recent work on a reconstructed Old Spanish epic poem and Ilia Galán (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid) offered a philosophical reinterpretation of fifteenth-century Iberian gnomic poetry. Moving across time and space to nineteenth-century Latin America, three scholars presented their most recent monographic research: Wadda Ríos-Font (Barnard College) on the debates over colonial policies and competing ideals of nationhood in Puerto Rico through 1898; Nina Gerassi (Tufts University) on the impact of Darwin’s first contributions to the life sciences in Brazilian travel narratives; and Guillermo Zermeño Padilla (Centro de Estudios Históricos) on the concept of revolution in nineteenthcentury Mexico. Four Southern-Cone scholars, Gonzalo Aguilar (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Alejandra Laera (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Gabriel Georgi (New York University), and Mariano Siskind (Harvard University), examined in depth overarching concerns and historical developments in contemporary Argentinian and Brazilian fiction and film. Peruvian intellectual Julio Ortega also led a wide-ranging conversation on Latin American literature, culture, and politics with Nicaraguan novelist Sergio Ramírez. Two leading scholars and writer-activists shared their research on gender and sexuality in Latin American cultural and literary production: Juan Pablo Sutherland (Universidad de Chile) on Chile and Abel Sierra (independent researcher) on Cuba. Finally, in the modern Iberian field, Santiago López-Ríos Moreno (Universidad Complutense, Madrid) reconstructed from epistolary exchanges the complex intellectual ties between American scholars and Iberian women members of Madrid’s “Residencia de Señoritas.”

What is scattered across various university departments and disciplines is here united at the Mahindra Humanities Center: the study of Jews and

History of the Book CHAIRS: ANN BLAIR, ROBERT DARNTON, DAVID D. HALL, LEAH PRICE

In 2009 –10, the History of the Book seminar inaugurated a new tradition of ending the year with a graduate student conference in the history of the book, drawing speakers from various universities and many disciplines including history, history of science, history of art, and various literature and area studies departments, with a particularly strong representation in English, East Asian Languages, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. In 2010 –11, the conference was organized as a collaboration between Harvard and Yale. Monthly talks, meanwhile, highlighted recent work on book historical topics, notably: Daniel Raff (University of Pennsylvania) on the book-of-the-month club model; Stuart Shieber (Harvard University) on computer science and the future of books; Lewis Hyde (Kenyon College) on intellectual property and his new book, Common as Air; Ann Blair (Harvard University) on her new book, Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age; Angela Nuovo (Universita de Udine) on book collecting in the late Italian Renaissance; Urs Leu (Zentralbibliothek Zurich) on Hollis collections in Switzerland; and Nicholas Daly (University College Dublin) on Victorian bill-sticking. The seminar also cosponsored a talk with the Schlesinger Library—a meditation on the place of books in Progressive-era feminism by Barbara Sicherman (Trinity College).

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Judaism, Jewish cultures and societies.

Jewish Cultures and Societies CHAIR: SHAYE COHEN

The goal of the seminar is to provide a venue for scholarly discussions of Jewish cultures and societies, broadly conceived. Nothing Jewish is alien to us; any presentation that illuminates some aspect of the Jewish experience, ancient or modern, quantitative or qualitative, textual or social, is welcome. The seminar fills an important role within the humanities at Harvard, since our university has no single academic address for Jewish studies. What is scattered across various departments and disciplines is here united in one venue: the study of Jews and Judaism, Jewish cultures and societies. Over the past two years we have sponsored a large number of presentations on a wide range of themes, both historical and contemporary. These have included lectures on classical rabbinic texts, on the Dead Sea Scrolls, on medieval Hebrew poetry and its Arabic connections, on Jewish mysticism (kabbalah), on Jewish culture in the United States, and on politics and society of contemporary Israel. Our speakers have been American and Israeli, academic scholars and public intellectuals, junior and senior.

Medieval Studies CHAIRS: JEFFREY HAMBURGER, BEVERLY KIENZLE, KATHERINE PARK, NICHOLAS WATSON

The Medieval Seminar continued to offer a wide array of talks on topics drawing on the full range of disciplines represented by medievalists at Harvard, supplemented by other specialists from other institutions, both local and farther afield. Latin and Greek literature as well as various vernaculars; history of art, architecture, and archaeology; approaches new and old to framing the distant past and its impact and influence on the present; paleography, codicology, epigraphy, and other research tools that increasingly constitute independent areas of historical inquiry; medieval theology, spirituality, and religious practicesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;these and many other topics were debated and discussed in series of seminars, workshops, and lectures that served to bring together medievalists of all stripes from Harvard and the wider Boston area.

CHAIR: PANAGIOTIS ROILOS

The seminar on Modern Greek Literature and Culture offers transhistorical and crossdisciplinary explorations of aspects of Greek literature and culture from the fifteenth century to postmodernity. Presentations, which vary in theoretical approach, situate modern Greek studies within comparative contexts, including ancient and medieval Greece as well as Western, Balkan, and Mediterranean cultures. Over the past two years the seminar invited eight scholars as guest speakers, covering a wide range of topics from various disciplines in a span of twelve centuries. James Faubion (Rice University) opened the 2009 –10 lecture series with a talk on Foucault’s interpretation of the Socratic “know thyself.” Poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Ben-Gurion University) offered a poetry reading in both Greek and English. Alexander Kitroeff (Haverford College) talked about Greece’s Great Idea and the politics of cultural nationalism in the 1850s. Pietro Bortone (University of Illinois, Chicago) addressed the issue of (dis) continuities in ethnic identification and linguistic behavior, by focusing on the paradigm of the Greek speakers in Northeast Turkey. Maria Koundoura (Emerson College) addressed issues of transnational literacy while presenting a paradigm of a modern poetics modeled after the poetry of three major contemporary Greek poets who thrive outside Greece. The 2009 –10 lecture series concluded with a talk by Demetrios Pandermalis (Director, New Acropolis Museum) on the New Acropolis Museum’s architecture and exhibits. The 2010 –11 lecture series was launched with Olga Taxidou (University of Edinburgh), who examined how the notions of Hellenism, primitivism, and modernist performance are intertwined. Teresa Shawcross (Amherst and Mount Holyoke Colleges) offered her perspective on the issue of the narrator in the Chronicle of Morea. The lecture series closed with a talk by Constantin Michaelides (Washington University, St. Louis) on the architecture, both formal and vernacular, of the Aegean Archipelago and its representation in historical and literary texts, especially those of Stuart and Revett, Thomas Hope, and Alexandros Papadiamantis. The Second Biennial International Conference on Byzantine and Early Modern Greek Fictional Writing took place in December 2009, bringing to the campus several leading scholars in the field of Byzantine Literature. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Jeffreys (Oxford University) delivered the Nicholas Christopher Memorial Lecture in Modern Greek Studies on the topic of “The Afterlife of Digenis Akritis.”

CLOCKWISE | ELIZABETH BISHOP | BECKETT | NEW ACROPOLIS MUSEUM | ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Modern Greek Literature and Culture

Late modernist writings by African American and Native American authors were one of the foci of the Modernism seminar last year.

Modernism CHAIRS: PAIGE REYNOLDS, JOHN PAUL RIQUELME

Modernism seminar sessions from fall 2009 through spring 2011 involved speakers, from untenured assistant professors through chairholders, doing innovative revisionary work, often of a cross-disciplinary kind. The crossing of disciplines and media involved early film and literature in the talk by Evan Horowitz (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study). Matthew Wilson Smith (Boston University) examined the influence of neuroscience on European modernist drama. Three presentations concerned the visual arts and literature: on poetry and painting from a philosophical perspective by Charles Altieri (University of California, Berkeley); on Beckett and Robert Smithson by Nico Israel (Hunter College); and on the late modernist surrealist painter and writer, Ithell Colquhoun, by Mark Morrisson (Pennsylvania State University). Late modernism came to the fore in several other papers: on Muriel Spark by Marilyn Reizbaum (Bowdoin College); on J. M. Coetzee by Nirvana Tanoukhi (Harvard University); and on Elizabeth Bishop by Siobhan Phillips (Society of Fellows, Harvard University). Late modernist writings by African American and Native American authors were the foci of presentations by Angela Ards (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), who spoke on Zora Neale Hurston and June Jordan, and by Melanie Benson (Dartmouth University), who spoke on contemporary Native American narratives of violence. Two other speakers considered violence and writing: Sarah Cole (Columbia University) spoke on Yeats and the Irish Rising, and Nicholas Allen (National University of Ireland, Galway) talked about an important but little known writer, Eddie Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Malley, a key figure during the Irish Civil War.

Music, Sensory Ecologies, and the Body The seminar explores some of the emerging academic and artistic work engaging the body and senses within the context of sound and music. 2010 –11 was split thematically into two parts, with scholars presenting in the fall and artists in the spring. The fall included Wayne Marshall (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Michael Heller (Harvard University) discussing different parameters of sound, frequency and volume, and bodily processes of hearing and sensation. Flora Wilson (King’s College) and Joana Pimenta (Harvard University) raised questions of material images and the history of film, looking at early precursors to filmic visuality and filmmaker Chris Marker’s recent work. The fall concluded with Jason Stanyek (New York University) discussing a range of ethical and political issues entangled with listening, recording, and fieldwork. In the spring, DRC independent filmmaker Petna Ndaliko and Cherie Rivers (Harvard University) presented a film screening and discussion of Jazz Mama, a documentary engaging histories of sexual violence and women’s lives in the Congo. Visiting Harvard Blodgett artist John Luther Adams both mounted an installation at 29 Garden Street and discussed his compositions at a subsequent session. Thomas DeFrantz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) brought his perspectives as a dancer and scholar together in critically exploring the legacy of jazz pianist/composer Thelonious Monk. Finally, a two-part concert and discussion event featured the Dutch free-improvisation group, the Instant Composers Pool, and a subsequent discussion by Andrew Raffo Dewar (University of Alabama), elucidating a new generation of player pianos and other technologies that allow for “live” performances by deceased musicians.

Opera CHAIRS: JANE BERNSTEIN, ALESSANDRA CAMPANA, ANNE SHREFFLER

The Opera seminar featured five events in 2010 –11, and continued the tradition of hosting discussions based on pre-circulated texts rather than formal talks. Two events focused on opera stagings, which is a powerful theme in recent opera research. David Levin (University of Chicago) analyzed a contemporary German staging of Wagner’s Lohengrin, and Mary Ann Smart (University of California, Berkeley) examined film and DVD productions of Rossini’s Barber of Seville, including the recent film simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera. The notion of staging was expanded to include the opera house as an acoustic, social, and economic space in the Opera Quarterly’s conference on “Opera and the Space of Performance,” co-sponsored by the Opera seminar. Carol Oja (Harvard University) investigated another kind of operatic space in the nexus of race and politics in Bernstein’s On the Town, examining the role of “Exotic Ivy Smith,” played by the Japanese-American actress Sono Osato at the height of anti-Japanese racism during World War II. Finally, the seminar focused on an opera performed in Boston in its roundtable on Viktor Ullmann’s Emperor of Atlantis, which Ullmann wrote while interned in the concentration camp Terezin (Teresienstadt). Participants included Mark Ludwig (Terezin Foundation, Boston), composer Richard Beaudoin, who wrote the prologue performed with Ullmann’s work in the Boston Lyric Opera production, and Anne Shreffler (Harvard University).

SCENE FROM JAZZ MAMA | FRANÇOISE DASTUR | JOHN LUTHER ADAMS

CHAIRS: KAY KAUFMAN SHELEMAY, RICHARD WOLF

Philosophy, Poetry, and Religion CHAIRS: MARTY COHEN, PETER SACKS

Françoise Dastur (University of Nice Sophia Antipolis) presented on Heidegger’s treatment of deep affect (stimmung) at different phases of his thought, which found a place in a series of seminars on the possibilities and limits of discerning the being of self and other. Andrea Saiti (Boston College) articulated Husserl’s sternly minimalist account of empathy that cautions against romantic notions of communion. Catherine Corneille (Boston College), after acknowledging that religious experience of the other always remains beyond the purview of someone not belonging to that tradition, went on to consider how the experience of empathy can lead to new and possibly enriching forms of religious life. Drew Dalton (Saint Anselm College) explicated Levinas’ view of the human longing for the infinite that always exceeds empathic discernment, and that functions as a mediator in our relations to the Other, both human and divine. Paul Moyaert (Catholic University of Louvain), with the help of Lacan, found in the everdeferred erotic love of knights for an esteemed courtly lady a clue about infinite longing through sublimation. Azade Seyhan (Bryn Mawr College) surveyed melancholy time in German Romanticism, where both failure and success at encountering the infinite leads to an affective abyss. Hugo Moerno (Harvard University) spoke about modal ironism in Borges that called not to responsibility, as in Levinas, but to play, jouissance, and a kind of melancholic mysticism. David Aberbach (McGill University) asked whether in the biblical world the rejection of idolatry and the adoption of exclusive worship of an invisible God might be linked partly to the effects of trauma. Richard Kearney (Boston College), in dialogue with John Caputo (Syracuse University), asked what kind of God might exist in the creative not-knowing situated at the split between theism and atheism. Alex Forrester (Rising Tide Capital) speculated about the role of postmodern philosophy in the struggle for social justice, such as his own projects in micro-finance. Thomas Scanlon (Harvard University) addressed the moral dimensions of blame and responsibility that make sense once issues of control and free will are stringently confronted. All these seminars contributed to a discourse on ethics that open-minded moralists and good-hearted amoralists might find compelling.

2010 –11 was the final year in the Prints and the Production of Knowledge seminar, which was conceived as a four-year project

Prints and the Production of Knowledge in the Early Modern World CHAIRS: SUSAN DACKERMAN, KATHARINE PARK

The year 2010 –11 was the final year in the Prints and the Production of Knowledge seminar, which was conceived as a four-year project culminating in a major exhibition, “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” curated by Susan Dackerman of the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition, which examined the role of printed images in the construction and dissemination of knowledge of the natural world in sixteenth-century Europe, was shown at Harvard’s Sackler Museum from September 6 through December 10, 2011. The aim of the seminar was to engage graduate students, faculty, and staff in the shaping of this interdisciplinary exhibition and the creation of its substantial catalogue. The Mahindra Humanities Center seminar was coordinated with a graduate seminar in the Department of the History of Science which was co-taught by chairs Susan Dackerman and Katharine Park in spring 2010. Graduate students were involved in all phases of the exhibition, and the seminar served as a forum for the collaborative development of its themes and for the presentation of drafts of catalogue entries and essays. In 2009–11, Dackerman presented an overview of the exhibition; Harvard graduate students Jasper van Putten, Jaya Remond, Chris Barrett, Charlotte Gray, and Marisa Mandabach spoke on the research they conducted towards the writing of entries for the exhibition’s catalogue; Weissman Center paper and book conservator Theresa Smith discussed the analytical and conservation work she did on two anatomical prints from the collection of the Countway Medical Library; and Park presented her catalogue essay on early modern prints of allegorical subjects related to the mathematical and mechanical arts, a lecture accompanied by a demonstration of the relevant scientific instruments by Sara Schechner, curator of Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

F R O M L E F T | A N ATO M I C A L P R I N T | F R E U D | J E A N L A P L A N C H E | L A ST TA N G O I N PA R I S

culminating in a major exhibition.

Psychoanalytic Practices CHAIRS: HUMPHREY MORRIS, FRANCES RESTUCCIA

Seminar speakers over the last two years focused on film, painting, and literature. Esther Rashkin (University of Utah) employed Abraham and Torok to examine mourning in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. The film is a scene of analysis, she argued, that serves as the site of return for the unspeakable secrets of France’s use of torture in Algeria, and its collaboration in the extermination of Jews in the 1940s. James Penney (Trent University) located in Lucian Freud a view of the body as the experience of jouissance. The unselfconscious and indiscreet postures of Freud’s subjects give us the feeling that our look has transgressed the limits of decency. Inserting a disorienting visual pleasure within the field of social relations, Freud challenges us through his art to live in the world as vulnerably embodied beings. Jean Wyatt (Occidental College) aligned the central concept of Jean Laplanche’s theory of subjectivity, the “enigmatic signifier,” with the purposefully ambiguous language that characterizes Toni Morrison’s fiction. Just as a child’s psychic (unconscious) development pivots on a message from the parent that the child cannot decipher, Morrison’s reader has to fill in the gaps of the text; the final twist of each novel leads the reader to question her preconceptions. In addition to meetings that featured guest speakers, the seminar convened a monthly reading group. The reading group devoted 2009–10 to shaping broad questions about the relation of psychoanalysis to the visual arts, starting from Freud’s Michelangelo, Leonardo, and fetishism papers, and taking account of contributions by Laplanche, Lacan, and art historian T.J. Clark. In 2010–11, the group inquired more concertedly into the uneasy place of the image in psychoanalytic theory, starting with Freud’s Gradiva essay. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud locates psychic origin in wish-fulfilling visual hallucinations. But later, he speculates that what is originary is negative hallucination. The idea of a constitutive negativity of the visual image led to André Green’s exposition of the “work of the negative.” From here, the discussion turned to the image as locus of mourning in Barthes and Derrida.

C LO C K W I S E | J A N VA N E YC K . A R N O L F I N I M A R R I AG E | D O M I N I Q U E D E C O U R C E L L E S

The Renaissance seminar sponsored “The Woman in the Middle Ages and Renaissance” — a one-day conference.

Renaissance Studies CHAIR: TOM CONLEY

In 2009 –10, the seminar featured a variety of speakers. Dominique de Courcelles (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) spoke on Pierre de Messie and the relation of mysticism and travel to the new world. With help from the French Cultural Services and the France and the World seminar, the Renaissance seminar sponsored a one-day conference titled “The Woman in the Middle Ages and Renaissance” in which a variety of speakers exchanged views on Christine de Pizan, Madeleine de L’Aubespine, and Louise Labé. Mitchell Greenberg (Cornell University), presented sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury material related to his new book, Racine. Yves Hersant (École en Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) presented a master class on the mirror in Renaissance art and literature. Irène Salas (École en Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) delivered a paper on physiognomy in the Renaissance. Eight papers were delivered in 2010–11. Sara Miglietti (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) presented her research on the relation of law to the République. Her lecture was followed by Yves Hersant (École en Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), who examined madness in Renaissance culture. Dora Polachek (State University of New York, Binghamton) worked on feminism in the Renaissance through a reading of Les Dames galantes. Irène Salas (École en Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) analyzed the work of Ambroise Paré. David Laguardia (Dartmouth College) spoke on ephemera and chronicle and Michael Randall (Brandeis University) presented on a sequel to his recent book, Gargantuan Polity. Diego Pirillo (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) spoke on the Renaissance ethnographer, examining ancient texts and explorations in an expanding world. Yulia Ryzhik (Harvard University) presented new work on Shakespeare in Russian film. The seminar also cosponsored a one-day international conference titled “La Vision au Dix-septième siècle/Vision in the Seventeenth Century,” featuring two plenary speakers: Alain Viala (Université de Paris 3) and Christian Biet (Université de Paris 10). Panelists included Dominique Bertrand (Université Blasé-Pascal), Michèle Longino (Duke University), Juliette Cherbuliez (University of Minnesota), Jean-Vincent Blanchard (Swarthmore College), Claire Goldstein (Miami University), Hélène Bilis (Wellesley College), and Jeffrey Ravel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The Shakespearean Studies seminar aims to present the most current thinking about Shakespeare and early modern drama through a plurality of methodologies and approaches.

Shakespearean Studies CHAIRS: WILLIAM CARROLL, COPPÉLIA KAHN

In 2009 –11, the Shakespearean Studies seminar successfully continued its aim to explore the broadest range of approaches to Shakespeare’s texts and to consider the relation of Shakespeare’s plays to early modern culture. The range of speakers was matched by the variety of their topics, from performance-based analyses by Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State University), Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire), and Karen Britland (University of Wisconsin) to the visual arts by Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen) and Christina Carlson (Emerson College). Presentations by Adam Zucker (University of Massachusetts), Linda McJannet (Bentley College), and Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston) worked in the current mainstream of historicist methodology, while Dennis Britton (University of New Hampshire) was concerned with genre and Arthur Kinney (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) explored cognitive theory. Among the less easily categorized approaches, Laurie Shannon (Northwestern University) spoke on “Empires of the Nonhuman in Shakespearean Locales” and Jeremy Lopez (University of Toronto) explored canon formation through an analysis of collections of early modern drama over two centuries. Several of these talks took up similar issues, whatever their approach. Early modern encounters with racial/ethnic others featured in the presentations by Lanier, McJannet, and Maisano, with early modern/contemporary political issues prominent in the talks by Singh, Carlson, Shannon, Lanier, and Britland. Even traditional concerns with aesthetic form were approached freshly, in the presentations of Zucker, Kinney, and Britton. And prominent in virtually every talk was one of the seminar’s continuing themes, the status of women in early modern England. The hallmarks of the Shakespearean Studies seminar are clear: (1) presenting the most current thinking about Shakespeare and early modern drama; and (2) offering a plurality of methodologies and approaches, from historical and performative to textual.

C LO C KW I S E | S H A K E S P E A R E | C H A R L E S D I C K E N S | G LO B E T H E AT R E

Victorian Literature and Culture CHAIRS: LAURA GREEN, KELLY HAGER, JOHN PICKER, JOHN PLOTZ

During 2009 –11, the Victorian Literature and Culture Seminar hosted papers on literary and visual culture, music, the Victorian public sphere, and the history of medicine. Several of the talks drew on rich and unusual archival materials. For example, Mary Wilson Carpenter (Queen’s University) turned to a tubercular workingclass woman’s diaries to challenge representations of such patients as pawns of nineteenth-century medicine. Seth Koven (Rutgers University) explored the emotional and political connections between Cockney “matchgirl” Nellie Dowell and the wealthy radical Christian feminist Muriel Lester. In literature and other arts, Talia Schaffer (Queens College) explored unexpected byways of the Victorian novel’s marriage plot. Carolyn Williams (Rutgers University) spoke on Victorian melodrama. Martha Vicinus (University of Michigan) introduced the “aesthetic pessimism” of expatriate poet A. Mary F. Robinson. Music historian Hilary Poriss (Northeastern University) turned a skeptical eye on philanthropic narratives about nineteenth-century prima donnas. Several papers explored forms of representation in the public sphere: art historian Jennifer Roberts (Harvard University) spoke on the transmission of telegraphic images; Nicholas Daly (University College Dublin) on Victorian posters; and Elaine Hadley (University of Chicago) on representations of the Crimean war. Annual panel discussions highlight current graduate student work in Victorian Studies. The 2010 panel featured Elaine Auyoung (Harvard University) and Khristina Gonzalez (Brown University), both speaking on Dickens novels, and Aaron Worth (Boston University) presenting on information systems in the Victorian novel. The 2009 panel saw presentations on T. H. Huxley by Josh Olivier-Mason (Boston College); on Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (Harvard University); and on serial form in The Wire and The Moonstone by Anne Moore (Tufts University).

CHAIRS: ROBIN KELSEY (2009-10), EWA LAJER-BURCHARTH

In 2009-10, the seminar addressed the relations of subjects and objects in two radically different cultural spheres, prompting many opportunities for comparative reflection. Jonathan Hay (Institute of Fine Arts, New York) spoke about the surfaces of decorative objects in early modern China and the social significance of the pleasures they produced. Yukio Lippit (Harvard University) discussed the subtly modulated subject positions worked out in apparition paintings made by Chinese monks in the twelfth and thirteen centuries. The other two speakers shifted our attention to the streets of nineteenth-century Paris. Hollis Clayson (Northwestern University) talked about social traces of the city’s newly electrified night in impressionist painting, while André Dombrowski (University of Pennsylvania) analyzed the historical implications of Manet’s reflexive depictions of rag pickers. Issues of subjectivity, materiality, and social resourcefulness ran through the four talks and drew together, as well as set apart, the histories at stake. In 2010 –11, the seminar considered the issues of translation, circulation, and contact in modern art and visual culture. Mark Ledbury (Clark Institute) discussed the vicissitudes of history painting as a privileged form representation in the early modern period. Challenging its traditional evaluation, Ledbury sought to denormalize this genre of painting by considering various forms of deviation, displacement, and irregularity evident in the ways it was practiced in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury France. In the discussion of how history is translated into/constructed as an image, the question of violence was of central importance. Considering similar issues in the context of American/Asian culture, Maud Lavin (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) explored the question of cultural translation in relation to the representations of aggressive women in art, film, and popular culture. Interest in tensions between mainstream and marginal forms of representations and a concern with the issue violence linked Lavin’s talk to Ledbury’s. Ledbury’s concerns also resonated with the presentation of Beate Soentgen (Lunenburg University) who considered the “low” alternative to history painting, namely genre. Focusing on Chardin, Soentgen explored the relation between intimacy and communication.

J E A N - B A P T I S T E - S I M É O N C H A R D I N | T H E F O U R S L E E P E R S | J U L E S J O S E P H L E F E B V R E | M A U D L AV I N

Visual Representation, Transmission, and Translation

The Women and Culture seminar hosted speakers from programs in architectural history, English, history, Italian, and music.

Women and Culture in the Early Modern World CHAIRS: DIANA HENDERSON, MARINA LESLIE

The seminar honored its mission of interdisciplinarity and inclusiveness during the past two years with speakers from programs in architectural history, English, history, Italian, and music. Using a range of techniques and theoretical frameworks, these scholars engaged philosophical, theatrical, orthographic, musical, autobiographical, and courtly texts from the manuscript and print culture of the early modern period, reaching back to its antecedents in the medieval period and forward to the impact of early modern cultural forms on the nineteenth century. Speakers considered female characters as narrative interpreters and allegorical subjects, as well as women as patrons, readers, and writers. Amy Rodgers and Erika Boeckeler (Northeastern University) considered Shakespeare’s fictional females, while Erika Naginski (Harvard University) charted the sculpted fictionalization of Clémence Isaure and its consequentiality. Helga Duncan (Stonehill College) revealed new dimensions in Aphra Behn’s prose, Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston) looked afresh at Queen Anne’s contributions to the Masque of Blackness, and Sarah Ross (Boston College) suggested how women writers “threw Aristotle from the train.” From translations of Gaspara Stampa’s poetry by Jane Tylus (New York University) to reflections upon Lucy Hutchinson’s memoirs by Patricia Crouch (Framingham State College), from the analysis of the Duke of Buckingham and Henriette Marie’s dynamic relationship by Malcolm Smuts (University of Massachusetts, Boston) to interpretations by Claudia Olk (Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München) and Ellen Harris (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) of the competing images (and sounds) of such ambivalent female paragons as Mary Magdalene and Dido, respectively, the seminar uncovered common themes and conflicts involving gender, both as construct and lived condition.

FELLOWS

Fellows at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard

Postdoctoral Fellows

Each year, the Mahindra Humanities Center hosts a new group of postdoctoral fellows, some of whom join us through a collaboration with the Volkswagen Foundation. Fellowships are awarded to support projects that share the Center’s commitment to interdisciplinarity and internationalism. Mahindra Humanities Center postdoctoral fellows participate in Center events and present their work at the Center’s Fellows Lunch Series.

ANDREAS FISCHER

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Andreas Fischer received his Ph.D. from the Freie Universität, Berlin in 2005. After serving on the faculty of the History Department at Technische Universität, Berlin from 2004 to 2006, he became Assistant Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin where he teaches late antique and early medieval history. In his Ph.D., which was awarded with the Friedrich Meinecke prize in 2006, he worked on cardinals and the long vacancy of the years 1268 to 1271. Several articles on the history of the cardinalate and the papal curia in the thirteenth century followed. He published another volume, a study on Charles Martel and his rulership in 2011. Currently, his main research interests include narrativity and patterns of interpretation in early medieval historiography, especially in the so-called Fredegar Chronicle, and letters in late antiquity and the middle ages.

N I R VA N A TA N O U K H I

Nirvana Tanoukhi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from Stanford University. Her writings have appeared in New Literary History, Research in African Literatures, and the Routledge Companion to World Literature. She is coeditor of Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Duke 2011). Her literary translations from Arabic include Maryam of the Stories by Alawia Sobh and Passage to Dusk by Rachid al-Daif. Her current book project rethinks the geography of the “African Novel” through an interdisciplinary dialogue between spatial theories of literary form and the critique of scale by human geographers, toward a narrative theory of fictional settings. Her research interests include the history and theory of the novel, narrative theory, literary geography, the world literature debates, formalisms and contextualisms, and comparison.

CHRISTINA WA L D

Christina Wald is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in 2006. Her publications include Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), a co-edited essay collection on repetition (Kippfiguren der Wiederholung; Peter Lang 2007) and articles on early modern drama and prose, contemporary drama, Jane Austen films, and feminist and gender theory. Her postdoctoral research project was on Figures of Transformation: Transubstantiation, Disguise and Transculturation in Early Modern Prose Fiction.

ANNIE MCCLANAHAN DETLEF VON DA N I E L S

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Detlef von Daniels is Lecturer at the University of Witten/Herdecke. He received his Ph.D. from University of Göttingen in 2006. His book on The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective deals with how current changes in the course of globalization can be integrated into legal theory. At the Mahindra Humanities Center he organized two interdisciplinary workshops, one on “Ideas and Practices of Commonwealths” and one on “Theorizing the Commonwealth.” He is currently working on a monograph about The Idea of the Commonwealth that draws on discussions raised at the workshops.

Annie McClanahan began her first year as a member of the English Department faculty at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee in the fall of 2011. She is currently working on a book project she began while a fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center. This book, Fictitious Capital: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture, tracks the expansion and collapse of a financialized credit economy and asks how cultural texts have been compelled to account for these economic transformations.

JULIE ORLEMANSKI

Julie Orlemanski is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 from Harvard University. Her writings appear (or are forthcoming) in Exemplaria, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, postmedieval, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage (2009), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (2012), and Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (2013). She is currently at work on a study of representations of disease and medicine entitled Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Signs, and Narratives in Late Medieval England. Her research interests include the history of medicine, exemplarity, genre, and allegory.

S I TA S T E C K E L

Sita Steckel received her doctorate in medieval history in 2006 from LudwigMaximilians-Universität, Munich. Since then, she has held postdoctoral fellowships at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Harvard University, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. She currently holds a research post at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Excellence‚ Religion, and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures at WWU Muenster. Her first book on Cultures of Teaching, dealing with scholars as religious experts in Western Europe c. 800– 1150, attempts to reframe the old narrative of a rise of scientific thought in the Medieval West by looking at regional cultural dynamics

and religious factors. Her new project is a study of the highly charged and culturally productive conflict between the secular clergy and the Franciscan and Dominican orders in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France. Recent and forthcoming shorter publications concern a range of topics from macro-historical developments of religion in the Medieval West and their portrayal in modern historiography to gender polemics in the High Middle Ages and emotions and censorship in Carolingian culture.

ANDREAS VICTOR WA L S E R

Andreas Victor Walser is Lecturer in Ancient History at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität in Munich. He studied ancient history and economics at the University of Zurich, where he received his Ph.D. in 2006. In his book Bauern und Zinsnehmer (2008), he examined the interactions between politics, law, and the economy in Ephesus in the early Hellenistic period (c. 300 B.C.). While at the Mahindra Humanities Center, he studied the political, social, and urbanistic implications of the creation of new political entities, so-called sympoliteiai, through the unification of formerly independent and autonomous city-states in the Greek world of the Hellenistic Period (fourth through first centuries BCE).

Senior Fellows The Mahindra Humanities Center periodically hosts an exceptional scholar, artist, or writer as a senior fellow. While in residence, senior fellows participate in Mahindra Humanities Center events and give public lectures.

JEANNIE SUK

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Jeannie Suk is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where she has taught criminal law, criminal procedure, family law, and the law of art, fashion, and the performing arts. Before joining the faculty in 2006, she served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court, and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was educated at Yale (B.A. 1995) and at Oxford (D.Phil 1999) where she was a Marshall Scholar, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D. 2002). She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy, was awarded the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize. Her writing has also appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Wall Street Journal, Slate, and elsewhere. She has given congressional testimony on law and innovation in the fashion industry.

Interdisciplinary Dissertation Completion Fellows

MADE POSSIBLE BY A GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION

The two annual dissertation completion fellowships offered by the Mahindra Humanities Center with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are intended to support work that crosses disciplinary boundaries within the humanities, between the humanities and the social sciences, or between the humanities and the natural sciences. 2 0 0 9 –1 0

Mary Anderson Committee on the Study of Religion Thou Art: On Representation of the Word and the Incarnation of the Human Subject Antara Datta Department of History War, Violence, and Displacement: Revising the Bangladesh Crisis of 1971 2 01 0 –1 1

Daniela Cammack Government Athenian Democracy and the Construction of Justice Ujala Dhaka Anthropology Politics of Belonging, Citizenship, and Claimmaking in the Muslim Neighborhoods of Mumbai

Mahindra Humanities Center events and seminars are open to faculty, graduate students, and other interested individuals. ONLINE INFORMATION

Weekly emails from the Mahindra Humanities Center include listings of seminars and other events sponsored by the Center. Please let us know if you would like to be added to our email list. Additionally, a full and up-to-date calendar of events can be found on our website: mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu PAPERS

For some seminars and events, copies of the papers are made available to participants in advance of the meeting. They can be accessed from our website. Please call the Mahindra Humanities Center at 617-495-0738 to obtain the password for each paper.

Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard Barker Center 12 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 617.495.0738 ph 617.495.0730 fx humcentr@fas.harvard.edu mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu

DIRECTIONS

The Barker Center is bordered by Prescott, Harvard, and Quincy Streets. Enter the courtyard from Quincy Street, opposite the Lamont Gate. The Barker Center is the large brick building facing the Faculty Club. The Mahindra Humanities Center administrative offices are located on the first floor in rooms 135 and 137. Other administrative offices, postdoctoral fellowsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; offices, and the Mahindra Humanities Centerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lounge are located next to the Barker Center in the Warren House. To locate Mahindra Humanities Center seminars and events, please consult the postings in the Barker Center main lobby. PARKING

Parking is available at no charge for Mahindra Humanities Center seminars and events only that take place after 4 pm, on a space available basis, at the Broadway Garage, located on Felton St. between Cambridge St. and Broadway. The garage closes at midnight. All parkers should identify themselves as participants in a Mahindra Humanities Center event (the guardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s list of events does not include the names of individual seminars and events). If the garage is full ask the attendant to direct you to another Harvard parking facility. Please contact the Mahindra Humanities Center for information on parking for conferences and weekend events.

Panel discussion on Cabaret at the A.R.T. Panelists include: Charles Maier, Carol Oja, Amanda Palmer, and Martin Puchner. Moderated by Homi Bhabha.

Staff DIRECTOR

Homi K. Bhabha EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Steven Biel ADMINISTRATOR

Mary Halpenny-Killip

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Sugata Bose Allan Brandt

ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR

Balraj Gill COORDINATOR

Julie Buckler Joaquim-Francisco Coelho Tom Conley Thomas Cummins

OF PUBLICATIONS AND

Ivan Gaskell

PROGRAMS

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Shannon Mackey

William Graham Stephen Greenblatt

EVENTS COORDINATOR

Christie McDonald

Sarah Razor

Louis Menand Martha Minow Mohsen Mostafavi

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Gregory Nagy Elisa New

Paul Buttenwieser

Stephen Owen

Rita Hauser

Katharine Park

Glenn Lowry

Leah Price

Yo-Yo Ma

Eric Rentschler

Anand Mahindra

Judith Ryan

Anne Rothenberg

Michael Sandel Amartya Sen Kay Kaufman Shelemay Diana Sorensen Susan Suleiman Maria Tatar Richard F. Thomas William Mills Todd III Jan Ziolkowski

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