Fall 2008 Humanities Forum Lecture Series

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.

9/10      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

Social Sciences Forum

9/24      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

Social Sciences Forum

10/15      4:00 p.m.      Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th floor

Indigenous and Human Rights in Latin America

James D. Cockcroft, Internet Professor, SUNY and Activist

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

Social Sciences Forum

(End of Human Rights Lecture Series)

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10/29      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.

SPONSOR

Department of Ancient Studies

with additional support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities

11/05      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 the Dresher Center for the Humanities

11/12      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 the Dresher Center for the Humanities

11/19      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

Dresher Center for the Humanities

12/ 3     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