Fellows Lectures Archive (2009-2010)

Christopher Boyer
Department of History and Latin American and Latino Studies

Vanishing Woods: Community, Forests, and Scientific Management

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.

Institute for the Humanities, lower level, Stevenson Hall
701 South Morgan, University of Illinois at Chicago

This presentation investigates the interconnected histories of Raramuri indigenous people, the anthropologists charged with assimilating them into Mexican society, and forestry in northern Mexico during the latter half of the twentieth century. It shows that the “development” process in the woods created new tensions within indigenous communities and ultimately promoted a very different sort of acculturation than official anthropologists had hoped. Nevertheless some communities discovered new ways of using their woods, while appropriating select components of the official assimilationist project.

Christopher Boyer is Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacan, 1920-1935 (Stanford University Press, 2003), as well as numerous article and book chapters. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the Fulbright Hays Foundation, among others.

2009-2010 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Colin Klein
Department of Philosophy and Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience

Emotions, Reasons, and the Functional Imaging of Moral Deliberation

Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 3:00 p.m.

Institute for the Humanities, lower level, Stevenson Hall
701 South Morgan, University of Illinois at Chicago

Moral reasoning is often characterized as a battle between cold reason and passionate (but ill-informed) emotion. Recently, many philosophers used functional brain imaging to support this view, and have gone on to draw skeptical normative conclusions about our deliberative capacities. I argue that the empirical work has been misinterpreted. Read properly, it shows that human moral reasoning is a kind of complex deliberation about social relationships. In this process both emotion and reason play crucial, irreducible roles.

Colin Klein is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He joined the UIC faculty in 2006 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2007. He is the author of numerous articles on the philosophy of mind, of science, and of psychology in such journals asPhilosophical Studies, Philosophical Psychology, and Philosophical Quarterly.

2009-2010 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Anna Kornbluh
Department of English

Fictitious Capital / Real Psyche: Finance and Psychology in Victorian Thought, Then and Now

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 3:00 p.m.

Institute for the Humanities, lower level, Stevenson Hall
701 South Morgan, University of Illinois at Chicago

To Realize Capital: Libidinal and Financial Economies in mid-Victorian Realist Form

The popular and scholarly tendency to explain financial crises as primarily psychological phenomena has a noteworthy history.  In the Victorian era, the emergence of the discourse of Psychology directly paralleled the development of financialization.  While financial journalists, popular essayists, and novelists registered concerns about “fictitious capital,” the nascent science of mind set about explaining financial abstraction as the natural issue of the “psychic economy.”  In turn, a new generation of Political Economists absorbed these psychological precepts, positing the psyche as the real basis of all economic relations.

Anna Kornbluh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 2007 and taught at UIC as Visiting Assistant Professor before joining the UIC faculty in 2008.  She is the author of several articles and chapters.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 3:00 p.m.

The 2009-2010 Institute Fellow Public Lectures:
“Rethinking Queer History. Or, Richard Nixon, Gay Liberationist?”

Since the 1970s U.S. historians have produced a rich literature on the history of homosexuality, emphasizing themes of oppression, resistance, and community. Can an exploration of Chicago’s past allow us to rethink some of the key assumptions in the field?

John D’Emilio is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  His numerous publications include Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:  The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1993, nominee for Pulitzer Prize in U.S. History 1983);  Intimate Matters:  A History of Sexuality in America (University of Chicago Press, 1997);  The World Turned:  Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Duke University Press, 2002);  and Lost Prophet:  The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (The Free Press, 2003;  National Book Award Finalist 2003).  His research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society, among many others.

Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 3:00 p.m. ** Changed Date **

The 2009-2010 Institute Fellow Public Lectures:
Creation, Authorship and the Will in Seventeenth-Century France

Sevigné, La Fontaine, Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld: the names of great authors whose texts are at the center of the French literary and cultural canon. In my project, I demonstrate that their work is engaged in a sustained and sophisticated dialogue with the discourses of idolatry and voluntarism. Their often innovative literary works demonstrate, in form and content, their attempts to provide a model of human authorship that would be neither an illegitimate usurpation of divinity nor a denial of the embodiment and contextualization of the human self, and represent a period when religion, literature, and philosophy were not yet separate spheres.

Ellen McClure is Associate Professor of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Her publications include Sunspots and the Sun King:  Sovereignty and Mediation in Seventeenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press, 2006) as well as numerous articles.  Her research has been supported by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The 2009-2010 Institute Fellows Public Lectures

Soul Matters: Plato’s Phaedo in Historical Context

Constance Meinwald
Department of Philosophy

Monday, April 5, 2010 at 3:00 p.m.
Institute for the Humanities, lower level, Stevenson Hall

The Greek psyche, starting from an original core notion of whatever was responsible for life, eventually developed to become both the immortal soul of the religious traditions and the topic of psychology. By Plato’s time the profusion of thought on this entity (in sources as diverse as poetry, Pythagoreanism, and law-court speeches) raised pressing questions. I read the Phaedo as developing parts of philosophy that deals with change, perception, and explanation to provide support for the ambient ideas that had the psyche as our real self, capable of wisdom, and immortal.

Constance Meinwald is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her publications include Plato’s Parmenides (Oxford University Press, 1991) as well as several articles on Plato’s Philebus. Her research has been supported externally by the Center for Hellenic Studies. She was a UIC University Scholar in 1993-1995.

A reception will follow. For more information, call 312-996-6354.