Speaker: Ruffins, Fath;
Over the last 30 years, material culture studies have drawn from many sources, including the connoisseurship monographs of the decorative arts, which are resolutely "non-raced," as well as ethnographic scholarship which focuses on the tangible and intangible productions of various "folk" who are highly specified in terms of race, class, and other categories such as region, religion, and ethnicity. Yet most material culture studies, especially those that analyze 20th century production/consumption patterns, tend to elide any considerations of race or ethnicity when discussing the individually produced and mass-produced objects of modern and contemporary societies. Certainly, individuals and groups make and use objects to signify personal and group identities. In her lecture, Professor Ruffins will ask, Do specific uses then inscribe identities upon particular objects? Can object identities be multiple, malleable, and include racial or ethnic associations in production, distribution, and use? Are there race-neutral or generic objects? Do object identities change based on the context of collecting and/or display? What do we mean when we say that an object is Latino or African American, or any other racial/ethnic designation? Does that make all other objects Anglo or white? The lecture's aim is to raise questions and to stimulate both a theoretical and pragmatic conversation about race and material culture.

Speaker: Free Water, Washington University, CHUM, Wesleyan
Professor Steven Meyer (Washington University, St. Louis): "The Free Water of Consciousness: Distinguishing Robust from Rigid Empiricisms": Nov. 14th, 2011

Speaker: Fabian, Ann;
How did natural history change when men of science began to collect and catalogue human remains? When the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus died in 1778, he left behind a collection that included nearly 20,000 sheets of pressed plants, thousands of insects and thousands of mineral specimens. When American craniologist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, he left behind a collection of more than 1500 human skulls. Although Dr. Morton described his specimens with a care and precision he learned from naturalist colleagues, his collection of human dead and his inquiry into human difference marked an important shift in the nature of natural history. Professor Fabian's talk builds on the work of her recent book, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead, but focuses on recent well-publicized efforts by a group of biologists who set out to "restore" Morton's reputation as an objective man of science. Why does the work of this naturalist matter still? Why and how do human remains matter? How do facts extracted from dead human bodies circulate through communities of the living?

Speaker: Fish, Stanley;
Author Stanley Fish spoke on "What are the Humanities Worth?" Sept. 21 in Memorial Chapel. Fish, a professor of law from Florida International University in Miami, addressed the status of the humanities in the academy and in today’s world. Fish has written more than 200 scholarly publications and books.