2013-2014

Biotechnical Ecologies: Lively Participation in the Contemporary City

A Baker-Nord Faculty Works-in-Progress

City space is fast becoming the central playground for the experiential, political and ideological forces shaping lives and discourses both within the specific boundaries of urban centers, and across the globe. Schifani’s ongoing research explores ways of creating and participating in contemporary urban space, with a particular focus on the new media technologies and ecocritical tactics that urban dwellers use to engage, and change city space.

Mapping Ibuse Masuji’s “Kuroe Ame”

A Freedman Fellows Presentation

Since the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, the name “Hiroshima” has come to signify less the name of a city than an unthinkable event or an incalculable fear of nuclear war. While an official culture of commemoration has grown up around the site of the actual bombing, Mark Pedretti examines literary artifacts that paint a very different image of the city, and suggests a different form of historical memory.

Rockwell Kent and Greenland

A Humanities Related Event

Painter, author, illustrator, adventurer, social activist, ROCKWELL KENT (1882-1971) was one of America’s most influential and important artists reaching his greatest popularity during the 1930’s and 1940’s. His creative versatility was legendary. Best known as the definitive illustrator of such literary classics as Moby Dick, Candide and The Canterbury Tales, Rockwell Kent’s iconic images became permanent fixtures of the human imagination.

Unworkable Hermeneutics

A Baker-Nord Digital Humanities Event

Digital Humanities scholarship, among other things, is focused on the question of interpretation. Most notable in initiatives such as topic modeling, where algorithms are employed to identify unnoticed patterns in texts or time periods, hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) dominates one facet of Digital Humanities thinking. Yet, hermeneutics is merely an interface for engaging with a text or idea. In this talk, Jeff Rice, Martha B.

The Protean Virgil: Book History and the Reception of Aeneid 1 in the Renaissance

VERGIL WEEK – A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event

This talk will focus on how the beginning of the Aeneid was read in the Renaissance. The emphasis will not be on Virgilian influence on the great writers of the period, but on how the poem was read at school, to provide a part of the common cultural foundation of the early modern period. Examination of the early printed editions read by Renaissance readers and the marginal annotations they left in their books shows that the Aeneid was generally read in a three-step process.

The Lives of Others: The Novel as a Looking Glass

A Baker-Nord Cosponsored Event