Recent and Upcoming SCE Events:
CWRU, Cleveland, and Vicinity

Crimes of the Genome: Literature and the Gene for Violence
Wednesday 14 September 2005, 4:30 p.m., Gund Moot Court (A59)
Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor and Chair of English at Vanderbilt University

Who among us would like to be told that we possessed a gene predisposing us to violent crime? What would the world be like if society could identify potential criminals before they ever broke a law? Philip Kerr's novel A Philosophical Investigation imagines a world in which advances in biomedical science make both scenarios possible. Kerr's dystopian fable is only one of an outpouring of novels, stories, films, and plays that engage with contemporary genetics. Indeed, the fictional treatment of biomedical science is one of the most striking literary developments of the last decade. Jay Clayton's talk explores Kerr's A Philosophical Investigation alongside the issues of Nature and Science that published the draft sequence of the Human Genome to support his argument that the gap between what C. P. Snow once called the two cultures "literature" and "science" is closing, with implications for legal, literary, and scientific communities alike.

Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor and Chair of English at Vanderbilt. He is the author of Romantic Vision and the Novel (Cambridge UP, 1987), The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory (Oxford UP, 1993), and Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford UP, 2003), and coeditor of Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (U of Wisconsin P, 1991) and Time and the Literary (Routledge, 2002). Since 2003, Professor Clayton has turned his attention to the intersection of popular culture, science, and law; he and a group of co-investigators - comprising legal, medical, and literary scholars from Vanderbilt and Duke Universities - were the first group working in the humanities to be awarded a National Institutes of Health grant, for their investigations of popular culture and genetics with National Human Genome Research Institute.

***

Beginning in the fall of 2003, Case Western Reserve University's English Department sponsored an Authorship Collaborative under the leadership of Martha Woodmansee. The group has been working on a web-based collaborative research project at the intersection of law and culture -- specifically, the domain of international intellectual property covered by copyright. The collaborative is made up of nine advanced undergraduates from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, three graduate research assistants from Law and Social Sciences and a Professor from the English department. The goal of the collaborative was to give the undergraduates an opportunity to participate in basic research and to interact within a collaboratory environment. The output of the collaborative is this group web site that expands the initial research of Professor Woodmansee in her article "Beyond Authorship: Imagining Rights in Traditional Culture and Bio-knowledge."

***

Each semester the SCE sponsors the local Graduate Theory Reading Group dedicated to exploring and complicating current interdisciplinary theoretical issues.

This spring, the group continues its focus on "Narrative Across the Disciplines" begun in the Fall 2003 semester. The Graduate Theory Reading Group currently meets Tuesday afternoons throughout the 2004 Spring semester. For more information, please contact Jamie McDaniel or Chalet Seidel.

In the spring of 2003, the group focused on "Hypertext Theory," exploring various definitions, examples, and theories of the electronic artform and its paper predecessors. For more information, please contact Darcy L. Brandel or Jamie McDaniel.

***

The North Coast Theory Group last met in the Spring Semester of 2002. The selections chosen for those meetings prepared NCTG participants for the Siting Secularism Conference held at Oberlin College from 19-21 April 2002. The agenda and readings for the Spring 2002 meetings were as follows:

Sunday, 10 MARCH 2002 (3:30 p.m.)
Readings: Contexts of Secularism

Upendra Baxi, "The Constitutional Discourse on Secularism," from Upendra Baxi, Alice Jacob, and Tarlok Singh, eds. Reconstructing the Republic.

Mushirul Hasan, chapters 5 ("Secularism: The Postcolonial Predicament") and 6 ("Forging Secular Identities") from Legacy of A Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since Independence.

Muzaffar Alam, "Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society." (No source provided)

Rustom Bharucha, "The Shifting Sites of Secularism," from Economic and Political Weekly, January 24, 1998.

Sunday, 24 MARCH 2002 (3:30 p.m.)
Readings: Crises of Secularism

Partha Chatterjee, "Secularism and Tolerance" in: Rajiv Bhargava (ed.)
Secularism and its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Gauri Viswanathan, "Literacy and Conversion in the Discourse of Hindu
Nationalism" in: Race & Class 42.1 (July-September, 2000) and chapter 1 ("Cross Currents") in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and
Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998)

Ashis Nandy, "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious
Toleration" in: Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and its Critics and "The
Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism and Other Masks of Deculturation" in: Patricia Uberoi, Veena Das, and Dipanker Gupta (ed. ) Tradition, Pluralism, and Identity: In Honor of T.N. Madan (New Delhi: Sage, 1999).

Sunday, 7 APRIL 2002 (3:30 p.m.)
Readings: Law, Gender, and Secularism

KumKum Sangari, "Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies" in: Economic and Political Weekly, December 23, 1995 andEconomic and Political Weekly, December 30, 1995, and "Gender Lines" in Social Scientist 27.5-6 (May-June 1999).

Nivedita Menon, "State/Gender/Community: Citizenship in Contemporary India" in: Economic and Political Weekly, January 31, 1996(?).

***

If you have a local event or activity you would like to announce on this page, please send details to Kurt Koenigsberger.