2012 Spring Event Schedule

Thursday, February 09
IPRH Seminar Room (Lower Level)
3:30pm

Seminar with Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke)

“The Character of the University”

To register, please contact unitcritra@gmail.com.

Reading
Aravamudan, Srinvias. "The Character of the University." boundary 2 37.1 (2010): 23-55.

Friday, February 10

"The Ends of History" (Symposium)
Levis Faculty Center, 3rd floor

A Winter Symposium co-organized by the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture and Society. Featuring panelists Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke), Stephen Best (University of California Berkeley), Rachel Buurma (Swarthmore), Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania), and Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois).

Co-Organized by the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, and Society.

Co-sponsored by LAS, IPRH, English, and the School of Literatures, Cultures, & Linguistics.

Event Schedule

Optional Background Readings

Monday, February 20
Program in Jewish Culture & Society Seminar Room, English 109
4pm

“New Cities for New Jews: Zionist Fantasy, Utopia, and the Modern Urban Landscape”

A workshop co-organized with the Program in Jewish Culture and Society

Eitan Bar Yosef (Ben Gurion University)

Focusing their narratives on the northern port-city of Haifa, transformed by the Jews from a poor Oriental town into a thriving Europeanized metropolis, both novelists employ the city’s spatial, cultural, and human features to present radically different views concerning the Jewish colonization of Palestine: for Herzl, it becomes a utopian triumph; for Guttenberg, a deplorable failure. By reading these imaginary modernist landscapes, the paper examines how Zionist fantasies employed late nineteenth-century utopian visions—familiar from the work of Bellamy, Morris, and others—to construct urban settings which either transform the Jewish body and soul - or reveal, ultimately, the impossibility of this transformation.

Friday, March 2
Spurlock Museum Auditorium
4pm

"How can we sing -- in a strange land? In search of political possibility"

Lawrence Grossberg (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

CAS/MillerComm presentation
Hosted by Institute of Communications Research in collaboration with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

Optional Background Readings
Grossberg, Lawrence. "Introduction: We All Want to Change the World." Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 1-6.

-----. "Considering Value: Rescuing Economies from Economists." Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 101-168.

-----. "Modernity and Commensuration: A Reading of a Contemporary (Economic) Crisis." Cultural Studies 24, No. 3 (May 2010): 295-332.

-----"Standing on a Bridge: Rescuing Economies From Economists." Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, 4(2010): 316-336.

Monday, March 12
Levis Faculty Center, 3rd Floor
8pm

"1930s 'Banlieutopia' and the Films of Julien Duvivier"

Margaret Flinn (French, Media and Cinema Studies)

Optional Background Readings
Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-27.

 

 

 

 

Thursday, March 29
Spurlock Museum Auditorium
4pm

"Whither Syria?"

Joshua Landis (Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma)

CAS/MillerComm presentation
Hosted by Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies in collaboration with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

Monday, April 2
IPRH, First Floor Lecture Hall
8pm

"Technology in Theory and Practice"

A graduate student panel

Event Schedule

Thursday, April 26 - Friday, April 27

Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of "Spring"
A Conference on aesthetics, politics, and new revolutionary movements
I Hotel Conference Center, 1900 S. First Street, Champaign, Illinois

Keynotes: Bonnie Honig (Northwestern University), Saba Mahmood (University of Californa, Berkeley), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Panelists: Mohammed Bamyeh (University of Pittsburgh), Noha Radwan (University of Californa, Davis), Jeffrey Skoller (University of California, Berkeley), Phillip E. Wegner (University of Florida), Rebecca Zorach (University of Chicago), Melissa Orlie (Illinois)

Co-organized with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Lead Organizers: Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Unit/English), Dianne Harris (IPRH/Landscape Architecture), J.B. Capino (Associate Director Unit for Criticism/English), Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology/Global Studies), Markus Schulz (Sociology), Irene Small (Art History).

Co-sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Center for Advanced Study, the School of Architecture, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, the Department of English, the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Sociology and the Transnational Sociology Area, the Department of Religion, the School of Art & Design, the Center for Global Studies with the aid of a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant, the Department of Political Science, the Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, and the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities.

Seminar Information and Schedule