HUMANITIES FORUM LECTURE SERIES
FALL 2008
Including in September and October
The Human Rights Lecture Series Commemorating the
60th Anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
The United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights has agreed to speak at UMBC this year. The date of this event will be posted on the Dresher Center Website as soon as the Deputy provides us with her availability www.UMBC.edu/DresherCenter.
September 9, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Gender and Human Rights in Contemporary Africa. Norma Kriger, Independent Scholar formerly with Human Rights Watch
Drawing on her research and experience with Human Rights Watch in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Dr. Kriger will explore broad issues about gender and human rights as they pertain to elections, liberation wars, sexual violence, land, and migration in Africa. What are the strengths and weaknesses of a gender and human rights approach to understanding African politics? Does a human rights discourse promote or derail democratization? In the latter case, what responses are available to the international human rights community?
SPONSORS: Dresher Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences Forum
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September 24, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th floor
Social Justice, Health and Human Rights. Ruth Faden, Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
What is the relationship between justice and basic human rights? In what sense is health a basic human right? Why should we care? Dr. Faden’s lecture looks at these foundational questions in national and global health policy in the world today.
SPONSORS: Bioethics Student Association, Dresher Center for the Humanities, Health Administration Policy Program, The Hilltop Institute and Social Sciences Forum
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October 15, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th floor
Indigenous and Human Rights in Latin America. James Cockcroft, Internet Professor, State University of New York and Fellow at the International Institute for Research and Education
Professor Cockcroft will examine today’s processes of revolt among indigenous peoples in Latin America, in particular in Bolivia and Ecuador, involving attempts at new practices of plurinational and intercultural forms of democracy, ecologically sustainable development, community-based autonomies, and solidarity with other sectors of society locally, regionally, and internationally. He will focus especially on the re-founding of national states and US-European interventionism in the context of UN declarations on indigenous rights, human rights, and national sovereignty.
SPONSORS: Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Dresher Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences Forum
(End of Human Rights Lecture Series)
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October 29, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Ancient Studies Week
Pompeii and the Roman Villa Exhibiting Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples. Carol Mattusch, Department of Art History, George Mason University
Dr. Mattusch, a specialist in ancient bronze sculpture and the curator of several exhibits of Classical art, will give an illustrated lecture and discussion of the lives of the elite Romans who owned luxurious estates around Pompeii and the art that these Romans collected.
SPONSORS: Department of Ancient Studies, Department of Visual Arts, Summer, Winter and Special Programs with additional support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities
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November 5, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Webb Lecture
Mrs. Henry Hobhouse Goes to War: Conscience and Christian Radicalism in WWI Britain. Seth Koven, Department of History, Rutgers University
Professor Koven will present the remarkable private and public war waged by the militantly patriotic Mrs. Henry Hobhouse, mother of three sons fighting on the Western front, to free her oldest son Stephen, Britain's most celebrated prisoner of conscience and Christian pacifist during WWI. Consider the story of one of England's most distinguished landed gentry families and the high political maneuvering that brought Lloyd George's wartime cabinet to a standstill and compelled Britons to confront the meaning of conscience in a liberal society at war.
SPONSOR: Department of History with additional support from Dresher Center for the Humanities
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November 12, 7:00 p.m. University Center Ballroom
The 30th Annual W.E.B. DuBois Lecture
DuBois and Africa: The Convergence of Consciousness . Molefi Kete Asante, Department of African American Studies, Temple University
Professor Asante is an expert on African culture and philosophy and is the author of 65 books and more than 300 articles. The founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies, he is considered to be one of the ten most widely cited African American writers and scholars.
SPONSOR: Department of Africana Studies with additional support from Dresher Center for the Humanities
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Novemer 19, 7:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
What is Language for? Robert Bringhurst, Poet, Typographer and Linguist
As the list of endangered languages grows, and endangered ones die off, linguists and native speakers have begun to collaborate on language revitalization and resuscitation, bringing genuinely dormant languages back to a new life in a new world. But is language independent of its environment? Is it the same spoken indoors and out of doors? In the interest of healthy human cultures, what can language do for us, and what can we do for our language?
SPONSORS: American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Baltimore Department of Visual Arts and the Dresher Center for the Humanities
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December 12 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Reading Fiction, Reading Politics: Transnational Modernism and Political Commitment in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Jessica Berman, Department of English, UMBC
Modernist literature has long been accused of turning away from social and political concerns to focus on aesthetic experimentation and the representation of inner life. Yet political literature from the mid-20th century seems to do the opposite, rejecting modernist experimentation in order to focus on a particular end. By looking at connections between politics and narrative experimentation in novels from late-colonial India and the Spanish Civil War, Dr. Berman will show, instead, the ways that modernist fiction can be read as deeply political.
SPONSOR: Dresher Center for the Humanities
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HUMANITIES FORUM LECTURE SERIES
SPRING 2009
February 4, 7:00 p.m. University Center Ballroom
Fiction Reading and Booksigning: The Glass Castle. Jeannette Walls, Best-Selling Author
Jeannette Walls will be speaking about and reading from her New York Times best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle. In this book chosen for UMBC’s New Student Book Experience Walls describes growing up in the desert of the American Southwest and then in a West Virginia mining town with her three siblings and the brilliant, unorthodox, irresponsible parents who manage at once to neglect them, love them, and teach them to face their fears. Despite deprivations the children grow up reading Shakespeare and dreaming of the beautiful glass house they will all one day build.
SPONSORS: Division of Student Affairs, Dresher Center for the Humanities, Office of Undergraduate Education
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February 18, 7:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Transmodernism Panel. James Mahoney, Department of Visual Arts, UMBCCatherine Pancake, Independent Filmmaker and MusicianElizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago Moderated by Preminda Jacob, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC
“Transmodern” is a term that came into use in the early 1990s to denote emerging attitudes, values, and aesthetics that seemed to move past postmodernism's canon of critique into more intriguingly open areas of cultural inquiry and practice. The rise of the Internet has networked a transmodernity that includes green and liberation theologies, alternative music, multiculturalism in every form, and a re-engagement with the question of symbols in art, etc. In essence, the transmodern is a proactive recasting of the primal modernist condition, one in which, as Karl Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.”
SPONSOR: Dresher Center for the Humanities
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March 11, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Women’s History Month Lecture
The Muslim Headscarf in Europe: Veiled Threat or Religious Freedom? Claudia Koonz, Department of History, Duke University
Even as the European Union promises to create shared cultural values, vehement disagreements about the Muslim headscarf reveal deep divisions within German, French, and British attitudes to immigrants. Does a woman wearing a headscarf, or hijab, signify subservience to oppression, an identity statement, or religious piety? Who has the right to decide? Professor Koonz explores the answers to these questions within three visual cultures as a way of connecting gender, Islam, and human rights.
SPONSORS: Department of Gender and Women Studies, Department of History, Dresher Center for the Humanities, UMBC Women’s Center
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March 25, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th Floor
The Daphne Harrison Lecture
Gaining Information, Knowledge, and Power in the 21st Century. Carla Hayden, Director, Enoch Pratt Free Library
Libraries are changing and dynamic places that offer opportunities and countless resources. As the information hub for Baltimore, the Enoch Pratt Free Library's mission is to empower and equip citizens with information and educational resources to help shape their future.
SPONSOR: Dresher Center for the Humanities
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Apirl 15, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th Floor
Fiction Reading: Last One In. Elise Levine, Award-winning author
Author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedication, Elise Levine was named by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most important emerging women writers. She is the recipient of a (Canadian) National Magazine Award for fiction as well as numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. In Last One In, Levine’s forthcoming novel, a woman whose best friend dies while exploring an underwater cave must confront her own history of betrayals and self-betrayals, and explore the nature of the bonds that bind and liberate.
SPONSORS: Department of English , and Dresher Center for the Humanities
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April 30, 4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
The 2nd Annual Lipitz Lecture
Poetic Narrative: Non-linear Strategies for Digital Cinema. John Sturgeon Lipitz Professor, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC
Media artist John Sturgeon will discuss his new artwork and the non-linear narrative potential of multi-stream collage offered by high-definition video and interactive media. Sturgeon will also discuss the J. Paul Getty Museum’s restoration and archiving of his 1970s video art works.
SPONSORS: College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Visual Arts, and Dresher Center for the Humanities
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May 5, 7:00 p.m. University Center Ballroom
The United Nations' Role in Defining and Defending Human Rights. United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Kyung-wha Kang
Ms. Kyung-wha Kang, the United Nations' Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, will be coming from UN Headquarters in Geneva to
UMBC on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 to speak in the University Center Ballroom. Her visit is sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities and will conclude its celebration of the 60th anniversary of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights.
SPONSORS: Social Sciences Forum and Dresher Center for the Humanities