Fellows Lectures Archive (2010-2011)

2010-2011 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

SUSAN LEVINE 
Department of History

Distant Hunger: CARE and the Politics of U.S. Food Aid After World War II

Friday, October 8, 2010 at 2:00 p.m.

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

This paper will explore how internal issues within a non-governmental organization influenced the development of the modern state-based international food aid system. It suggests that CARE’s appeal to private charitable donations increasingly masked its ties to government resources and Cold War state polices and argues that private aid agencies like CARE became part of a complex public/private partnership in an international aid system.

In 1955 the CARE board of directors initiated a dramatic re-organization of the agencys administrative offices. The re-organization was occasioned by a budgetary crisis and resulted in the firing of staff, many of whom had worked for the agency since its formation just after World War II. While on the surface, CARE’s re-organization appeared simply to be a response to a budget crisis, in fact, staff issues were closely tied to the ambitions of certain CARE leaders to secure the organizations place as a major force in international food aid. This transformation hinged most centrally on making CARE one of the primary outlets for U.S. agricultural surplus commodities shipped abroad and on tying the agency closely to U.S. foreign policy goals in the Cold War.

Susan Levine is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her many publications include School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth Century Feminism (Temple University Press, 1995). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History and the American Association of University Women. She has additionally held a Rockefeller Humanist-in-Residence Fellowship from Duke University and a prior UIC Institute for the Humanities Fellowship in 2001-2002.

A reception will follow.

To request disability accommodations or for more information, please contact
Linda Vavra, 312-996-6354.

2010-2011 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Steven Marsh, 
Department of Hispanic & Italian Studies

“Spanish Film, a Counter-History”

Friday, December 3, 2010 at 2 p.m.

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

This lecture draws upon the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to offer a spatial reading of Spanish film history, focusing particularly on montage. A fragment of a larger work that seeks to map the evolution of sound cinema in Spain from the surrealist period of the 1930s to the present day, the paper will address questions of representation, experimentation, abstraction, and dissonance as manifested in a group of short documentary films from the 1960s.

Influenced by both Luis Buñuel and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, the documentaries to be discussed were all made on the margins of the mainstream film industry. Each, in different ways, but from the perspective of their clandestine and rudimentary conditions of production, points up the contradictions of the Spanish dictatorship of the time, as well as challenging traditional filmic conventions. Finally, the paper analyzes what might be described as the films’ spectral antecedents, figures from the past embedded within the strata of the filmic texts whose shadows cast hints of a temporal simultaneity that exceeds the limits of empirical historiography’s capacity for representation.

Steven Marsh is Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  He joined the UIC faculty in 2008.  He is the author of Popular Spanish Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (Palgrave 2006) and joint editor of Gender and Spanish Cinema (Berg 2004) in addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters.   His research has been supported by the University of South Carolina, and by a Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities Award.

A reception will follow.

To request disability accommodations or for more information,
please contact
Linda Vavra, 312-996-6354.

2010-2011 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Rama Mantena, 
Department of History

“Disciplining History: The Making of Colonial Archives in South India, 1780-1880”

Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 3 p.m.

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

“Disciplining History” examines the origins of modern historiography (inclusive of new practices of history shaped by the emergence of a new historical method) in India by taking a closer look at the making of colonial archives starting in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. I argue that the emergence of modern practices of history and the entrenchment of history as disciplinary and expert knowledge in India lie in the productive intellectual encounter between the British and Indians in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. The encounter that was comprised of surveyors, collectors, antiquarians, philologists and their Indian assistants gave rise to “little”practices of history that crystallized as the discipline took shape in the early decades of the twentieth century. By suggesting that “little” practices of history emerged, I hope to uncover the everyday practices surrounding the acts of collecting, surveying and antiquarianism in the early colonial period and suggest that the practice of history was not simply a European “import”.

Rama Mantena is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002 and was a Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University (2004-2005) and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress Kluge Center for Research (2005-2006) before joining the UIC faculty in 2006. She is the author of several articles and chapters.

To request disability accommodations or for more information,
please contact
Linda Vavra, 312-996-6354.

2010-2011 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Alejandro Madrid, 
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies

“Spirituality, Cosmopolitanism, and Microtonal Modernist Music. Julin Carrillo’s Sonido 13 as a Cultural Complex”

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 3 p.m.

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

The paper explores the religious music of modernist Mexican composer Julin Carrillo (1875-1965) and the mystical overtones in his rhetoric about microtonal music through the filter of the contemporary spiritualist and esoteric movements that have taken him and his music as cultural symbols. By looking at the past through the filters of contemporary representations of that past, this paper investigates how spirituality, mysticism, and esotericism intersect in different ways as individuals develop networks of identification that engage discourses about modernity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

To request disability accommodations or for more information,
please contact
Linda Vavra, 312-996-6354.

2010-2011 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Colleen McQuillen
Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies

“The Modernist Masquerade: Synthesizing Art and Life in Russia, 1890-1914”

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 3:00 p.m.

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

“Modernist Masquerade” uses the motif of masquerade as an organizing principle for studying Russian literature and culture of the fin de siècle. Such an approach refracts traditional scholarly disciplines, literary movements and artistic media, enabling us to view the period’s cultural output as a diverse yet unified whole. In this talk I’ll focus on the problems of signification and challenges of constructing a narrative posed by acts of masking in a given literary text (Leonid Andreev’s Black Maskers, 1908) and in actual masquerade ball costuming practices of the day.

Colleen McQuillen is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Baltic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.   She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2006 and joined the UIC faculty that year.  She is the author of a numerous of articles and chapters as well as translations.  Her research has been supported by Meiers  and PepsiCo Fellowships, among others.

To request disability accommodations or for more information, please contact
Linda Vavra, 312-996-6354.

2010-2011 Institute for the Humanities Fellow

Ainsworth Clarke
Departments of African American Studies and English

“W.E.B. Du Bois’s Fugitive Writing and the (Un)making of the Negro”

Monday, April 11, 20110 at 3:00 p.m.

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

This paper examines Du Bois’s early writings on the methodological foundations of the social sciences by juxtaposing two of his central texts, “The Study of the Negro Problems” and “Sociology Hesitant.” Each of these essays brings into focus, albeit in quite different ways, the paradox confronting Du Bois in his attempt to configure the American “Negro” as the ideal social scientific object. By placing Du Bois’s methodological concerns within the broader conversation regarding the relation between the natural and the social sciences this paper proposes a different account of the transition in Du Bois’s critical vocabulary from his early sociological positivism to the great bio-critical texts such as The Souls of Black Folk.

Ainsworth Clarke is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Prior to receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2007 he was a Visiting Lecturer in English and American literature at Suffolk University-Dakar campus in Dakar, Senegal.  He is the author of a chapter in Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism (eds. Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) and joined the UIC faculty in 2007.

To request disability accommodations or for more information, please contact
Linda Vavra, 312-996-6354.