2014-2015

An Afternoon with Anthony Marra

Author Anthony Marra will read from and discuss “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, winner of the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. His novel – set in a nearly abandoned hospital in war-torn Chechnya – tells the story of eight-year-old girl Havaa, the neighbor who rescues her after her father’s disappearance, and Sonia, the doctor who shelters her over five dramatic days in December 2004.

Screening of “The Square”

A nominee for best documentary feature at the 2014 Oscars, The Square is an immersive experience, transporting the viewer deep into the intense emotional drama of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution. The film – an inspirational vibrant, lyrical, sobering account of young people struggling through multiple forces, in the fight to create a society of conscience – stands as a soaring testament to both aesthetic and political expression.

The film will be introduced by Pete Moore, Associate Professor of Political Science, CWRU.

What is College For?

Educators at all levels–from early childhood through college and university– are contending with rising public anxiety about the cost and value of education. Andrew Delbanco, Director of American Studies and Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and author of College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be?, will speak about the past, present, and future of a distinctive institution that is under growing pressure: the American college.

I Do and I Don’t: A Discussion of Marriage in the Movies

As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet Hollywood has always been cautious about how to label them–perhaps because, unlike any other genre of film, the marriage movie resonates directly with the experience of almost every adult coming to see it. Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, founder and curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, and Chair of the Film Studies Department at Wesleyan University. traces the many ways Hollywood has tussled with this tricky subject, explicating the relationships of countless marriages in the movies.

TEI Without Tech: An Introduction to TEI Concepts

A Baker-Nord Digital Humanities Event

Text encoding allows researchers to closely explore texts using the XML mark-up language. Prior to processing the works they want to examine, tagging parts of speech, themes, places, characters, historical figures and more, scholars work to understand the key questions that undergird material texts as they are transformed into machine readable data. What are the important markers on a manuscript, text, or image? What does the visual layout of the text do to or for readers? Who are the speaking and writing voices in a text?

Visibility, Exclusion, and Futures of Digital Humanities: Time for a Thaw

A Baker-Nord Digital Humanities Event

This presentation will propose a transformation of the digital humanities so that innovations are sociological and not only technical. Martha Nell Smith — Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities — will offer critical observations re digital archives related to the poems of Emily Dickinson.

Digital Project Management

A Baker-Nord Digital Humanities Event

This presentation will propose a transformation of the digital humanities so that innovations are sociological and not only technical. Martha Nell Smith — Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities — will offer critical observations re digital archives related to the poems of Emily Dickinson.

What Can We Learn about Language by Reading Millions of Books?

The dramatic growth of linguistic corpora enables the quantitative study of language on a scale that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. In this talk, Harsh Mathur, Associate Professor of Physics, will describe what we might learn about the evolution of language from such studies, using the regularization of verbs as a concrete example.

Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare has played a significant role in American literary and political culture since the time of the Revolution. Drawing upon his recent anthology for the Library of America — “Shakespeare in America”– James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, considers the alternative history of our nation conveyed in the work of representative American authors, exploring how Shakespeare has served a means to confront some of the issues that have long divided us as a nation.

The Richard N. Campen Lecture in Architecture and Sculpture: Across Art and Architecture

Using examples from her own creative practice, Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean and Eliel Saarinen Collegiate Professor of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan, will discuss the ever-shifting relationship between artistic production and the architectural project. At the center of the lecture she tackles pre-conceived notions about design, creativity, and the power of imagination.