Speaker: Nakamura, Miri
In post-1945 Japan, the concept of trauma has become inseparable from its experience in the Pacific War, whether it describes Japan itself as a victim, shattered by the destructions of the atomic bombs, or its colonial subjects, speaking up about the atrocities committed by the Japanese military force. In fact, trauma has become the dominant narrative to describe the nation's defeat, and this prevalence is often never questioned. But what came before trauma? Were there any other forms of narrating war in Japan? When exactly did war come to occupy the psychological space? In her lecture, Professor Nakamura considers these questions by looking back at the so-called "prewar" era of Japan and examining the anti-war literature of the detective fiction writer Yumeno Kyusaku together with early psychological studies on the effect of war.

Speaker: Chambers-Letson, Joshua
During World War Two, a series of legal performatives labored to legitimize the exclusion and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. A corresponding public relations campaign relied upon visual imagery in film, photography, and propaganda to define the Japanese American body as the limit point to national belonging and a threat to national security. Despite bans on photography by internees, a significant number of the incarcerated smuggled equipment into the camps, documenting the range of the life worlds exceeding the boundaries of the bared wire. In this talk, Professor Chambers-Letson argues that the photographic scrapbook of internee Moriyuki Shimada is a type of performing object, affirming affective particularity against the visual, social, and juridical exclusion of Japanese America; modeling alternative modes of social and civic belonging; and documenting the technologies of subjection that occurred within America's concentration camps.

Speaker: Torgovnick, Marianna
The imagination of atomic or nuclear disaster haunts the United States and has been a persistent motif in American novels and films, especially as concerns New York. Referencing historical, fictional, and filmic representations, Professor Torgovnick will uncover the changing terms of such representations over the decades and their implications for the aesthetic, ethical, and political imagination. What does it mean that the bombings of World War II rather rarely figure in such works? What is the persistent lure of destruction? And what does it have to do with New York? The lecture will be illustrated by film clips and examples, some of them today quite rare.

Speaker: Kiernan, Ben
This illustrated lecture, examines the ideologies behind outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations from the Caribbean to Korea, and twentieth-century case studies including the Nazi Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur. Professor Kiernan identifies connections, patterns, and recurring features that often gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. A range of historical evidence thus offers telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.

Speaker: Lutz, Catherine
Militarization remains a relatively minor concept in the academy, while war, peace, and torture are everyday terms of some pedagogy and some hallway conversation. This is both sign and challenge to the normalization of a huge military in the United States, that is, history's largest military budget and most extensive military-industrial-media-educational complex. Professor Lutz discusses how the bio-evolutionary notion that "security is the highest need of any organism" and other cultural premises form some of the foundation stones for everyday discussions of the idea of America and its military. These notions are especially illuminated by looking at those premises in two extreme contexts, including the massive military buildup currently underway in the US territory of Guam and the drive to revivify counterinsurgency theory and practice in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaker: Cavarero, Adriana
We need a global theory of violence, one that reconceptualises its lexicon as the current human practices of massacre turn defenceless people into exemplary targets of destruction. Terms like "War" and "Terrorism", faithful to traditional nomenclature, persist in observing the various devastating scenarios from the perspective of the regular or irregular warrior. The geopolitical realm, however, has changed. Defenceless victims, vulnerable people, and civilians butchered at random are the ordinary protagonists here. Professor Cavarero proposes that the newly coined category of "Horrorism" aims at interrogating the Zeitgeist from their point of view.

Speaker: Hayles, Katherine
The emerging field of the Digital Humanities challenges many of the foundational assumptions of the Traditional Humanities. Professor Hayles considers how as the scale of books analyzed changes from hundred to thousands, visualization of large datasets supplements linguistic analysis, and machine reading synergistically cooperates with hermeneutic interpretation, human and machine cognition mingle in ways unprecedented in Traditional Humanities practices. The implications of these changes for our understanding of the "human" at the center of the Humanities will be explored and extrapolated to envision humanistic practices of the future.

Speaker: Wald, Priscilla
Your mother is also your grandmother; bonobos are building fires, inventing language and anticipating pain; a young boy sprouts wings; a girl walks through walls. These figures populate the pages of popular fiction and traverse the screens of popular film. Beatific and monstrous, they intrigue, disgust, and terrify, asking us to think about what it means to be human in the age of biotechnology. Professor Wald considers how new concepts and new information produced by genomic research circulate through popular media to become meaningful. In the process, unresolved sociopolitical questions surface with renewed force, haunting scientific research and policy as well as our collective imagination. Or they turn chimerical, tantalizing remnants of a forgotten past. Thus is contemporary media converting genomic research into a mythology for the contemporary moment. Professor Wald’s writings include Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995), Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008), and is completing Clones, Chimeras and Other Creatures of the Biological Revolution. She is Professor of English at Duke University.

Speaker: McAlister, Elizabeth
Zombies are individuals thought to be soulless, socially dead, and only partly human. Zombies are former humans transformed into soulless bodies and bodiless souls. In her lecture, Professor McAlister explores the genealogy of the zombie and its various manifestations in American popular culture. She relates her ethnographic fieldwork with zombie spirits in Haiti, where a controversial practice is said to exist wherein souls can be separated from bodies, then sold into forced labor. Professor McAlister then considers the proliferation of American uses of the zombie in Hollywood films and beyond, arguing that zombies reveal changing American anxieties about slavery and the colonial past, consumption, sexuality, and the post-colonial, (pre-apocalyptic?) present. Zombies raise the specter of the human who has lost agency and whose will has been consumed by another. Zombies question what it is to be "human" and "alive."

Speaker: Riskin, Jessica
Two sorts of machines drew travelers and provoked discussion across Europe from about the early fifteenth century: religious automata in churches and cathedrals (such as the automaton Christ) and palace waterworks which enacted elaborate scenes and drenched the unwary. Professor Riskin moves from these machines and the conversations they generated to the philosophical conceit of the animal-machine as it emerged during the mid- to late 17th century. She proposes that the animal-machine was already a familiar image in both religious and secular settings as well as in philosophical and theological writing and, therefore, not a radical idea in itself. This very familiarity made it ideally suited to serve as a vehicle for closely associated ideas that were much more radical: the utter disembodiment of the human self. Professor Riskin is author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007), and is completing a book, Mind out of Matter, on the history of human/machine relations. She is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University.

Speaker: Orteiza, Marcela
How does the use of digital representation of the body, in conjunction with the actual body of the performer on the stage, affect the scenic design of the theatrical space and its viewer? Professor Oteiza explores the inclusion of the digital body and its effects on the aesthetic and architectural choices in a specific performance: for your eyes only, which is a hybrid performance piece where the viewer, as well as the performer, interact simultaneously in the digital and actual performative space. Professor Oteiza is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theatre at Wesleyan.

Speaker: Maus, Katharine
In early modern English, the words "proper," "property," and "propriety" refer, in an apparently contradictory manner, both to what is intrinsic to an individual and to what might be "alienated"--bequeathed, sold, or given away. Professor Maus' lecture focuses on the relationship between property, sovereignty, and subjectivity in Richard II. This play about contested property rights is widely considered the first in which Shakespeare manifests his distinctive ability to delineate what the critic Kirby Farrell calls a "strikingly individual interior life." Professor Maus' writings include Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (1995) and Four Revenge Tragedies of the English Renaissance (1995), and Being and Having in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (forthcoming); she is co-editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1 and The Norton Shakespeare. She is Professor of English ad the University of Virginia.

Speaker: Perta, Litia
Twenty years ago, Jacques Derrida proposed thinking about justice as undecidable: once within the realm of decision and calculation, he argued, we may be speaking about law but not justice. This paper explores Derrida’s formulation and considers it as a strategy we may employ toward both the idea of the human and the universal—terms at the core of our foundational documents and increasingly used in international treaties concerning the declaration and protection of rights. In what ways do decidability, determinacy, articulability—“figuring”—limit rather than protect the categories of human, justice and universal? Rather than considering the impossibility of a stable definition of “humanity” as a lack, how might we employ undecidability as the epistemic foundation that in fact makes necessary an ongoing study of the “humanities”? Professor Perta is Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. She completed her PhD in Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation on “The Archive: Body, Memory, Voice”.

Speaker: Bakke, Gretchen
In middle Europe there is a people who do not double and then divide themselves into outer (accessible) and inner (hidden) selves, but who instead congeal being into that which is readily available to the senses. Who, when changing form, change themselves; who when playing with selves play with form; and who, when asked to perform themselves in way indexical of an interiority hidden from view, become angry and protest and resist the division. In the context of contemporary Slovenia Professor Bakke discusses the possibility that the self is not a cross-cultural constant, that changes in economic system and geopolitical alliance — like colonialism and globalization — act upon local modes of self-conception and self-expression, and that cultural diversity might stem from modes of appropriation made accessible on the surfaces of things and people. Gretchen Bakke is Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities. She received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago with a dissertation on "Contemporary Slovene Art and Artifice."

Speaker: Greenhouse, Steven
Over the last two centuries, many thinkers, whether Mill, Marx, or DuBois, and many writers, whether Hugo, Sinclair or Orwell, presupposed that every human should be treated with dignity. To them, work was a vital part of being human, and work and workers were to be respected, even esteemed. Not only are workers often treated with out basic dignity, but in the United States, millions of workers are being treated worse and sometimes outrageously. Many companies pay workers too little to live on, provide no basic health insurance and rely on overseas sweatshops. Job security is absent as is trust between employer and employee. A vast disconnect has developed between the idealistic visions of intellectuals and the harsh realities of the modern workplace. Steven Greenhouse is author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (2008); he is Labor and Workplace Reporter for the New York Times.

Speaker: Berube, Michael
Michael Berube, Panterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania State University. Professor Birubi takes up the question of how the humanities can respond to the various challenges posed to humanism over the past two centuries by literary theory, animal-rights advocates, biotechnology, and by disability studies. With theoretical perspectives ranging from Alasdair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals and Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership to J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Richard Powers. The Echo Maker, Professor Berube asks whether the humanities depends on the distinctiveness of the human, and whether we can think about the human without distinct boundaries.

Speaker: Natter, Wolfgang
Wolfgang Natter Professor of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Professor Natter tests the thesis that the history and geography of globalization can be traced conceptually through the ways in which geographies of the political have demarcated, and been demarcated by, the concept of universality and its relations to particularity. Viewing the idea of contingent universality as conceptual spaces of globalization makes visible a series of "epistemological objects" embedded in various histories and geographies of the political as these came to be articulated through the European Enlightenment. A major presumption of the lecture, as it relates to the Center's theme, is that the subject of the humanities is one that is figured not only by time, but in the (social) production of space. Such an understanding invites scrutiny of the "centering" dynamics of scale and territorialization as well as the critical geographies of scaling and de-territorialization.

Speaker: Sawicki, Jana
Jana Sawicki, Professor of Philosophy & Women's Studies, William College In an interview conducted just before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault suggested that homosexual activists might advance sexual freedom by turning away from the discourse of sex-desire and exploring the possibilities opened up within an ethics of pleasure. Cultivating pleasure, he claimed, was more likely to enhance sexual freedom than appeals to the trope of "desiring man." Professor Sawicki asks, what is the ontological status of the pleasures that Foucault invokes? Why turn to an ethics of pleasure? Finally, why refuse the discourse of desire? Insofar as queer theorists (Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner) rely heavily upon psychoanalytic theory, they appear to have rejected Foucault's sustained critique of the discourse of desire. Are there good reasons to be wary of this reliance upon psychoanalytic thought? Or, must we burn Foucault?

Speaker: Malin, Yonatan
Monday, October 20, 2008 Music theory has been construed historically as the study of musical syntax and structure, but this definition leaves out the human element entirely. Professor Yonatan Malin asks who perceives musical structure, and how do they perceive it? How does music analysis interact with or establish interpretive communities? So-called "objective" and "subjective" modes of analysis will be examined with examples from the 19th and 20th centuries (Schumann, Forte, McClary). Approaches based on human cognition and experimental psychology are also considered (Lerdahl and Jackendoff, London); in these the "human" is imagined in broad or even universal terms. Finally, interpretive approaches are considered, which convey a particular "hearing" (Lewin, Agawu). In these the writer and reader/listener/performer take their places imaginatively within the organized flow of sound.

Speaker: Curran, Andrew
Monday, October 13, 2008 What was the framework for a science of man (or humankind) in 1750? In his lecture, Professor Andrew Curran provides a survey of the scientific, philosophical and literary debates contiguous to the question of the human's representation and classification during this era. Of particular concern will be the problem of how thinkers provided a scientific account of what was an unsubstantiated belief at the time: the fundamental unity of the human species.

Speaker: Martin, Emily
Monday, October 06, 2008 Exploring historical and ethnographic materials from the U.S. since WW II, Professor Emily Martin's illustrated lecture explores how and why sleep has recently become a complex management project dependent on discipline and attention. Even dreaming (for Freud, a chance to hear the unconscious) has become an activity that can be optimized for increased productivity. Research from American public health experts and sleep scientists together with incitements from the bedding industry and the pharmaceutical industry have contributed to making American sleep an enterprise that demands continuous labor rather than providing sore labours bath.

Speaker: Armstrong, Nancy
Monday, September 08, 2008 Professor Nancy Armstrong's literary reading of Darwin's major works finds Darwin reaching for the same figurative language that shaped gothic fiction. The result is a narrative that situates the reader outside the dynamic machine of nature in which Darwin meant to situate all human beings. To deal with the formal consequences of doing away with human exceptionalism while still writing as and to literate individuals, Darwin again turned to the novel and resolved the problem of man-as-species by much the same rhetorical strategies Dickens employed. Focusing on the problem that both Darwin and Dickens confront and the literary means by which they fashioned it for a Victorian readership reveals how Darwin convinced that readership to accept his anti-exceptionalist theory of nature and informs us why his theory is so open to (mis) interpretation even today.