2014-2015

The Joseph and Violet Magyar Lecture in Hungarian Studies: Counter-Constitutions: How a 21st Century Constitutional Revolution in Hungary Claimed Medieval Roots

Since independence in 1989, nationalist Hungarians have argued that the Holy Crown of St. Stephen and associated doctrines should be at the core of Hungary’s constitution. Kim Lane Scheppele – Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University – will discuss how the Crown is both a literal object given by the Pope to the first Christian king of Hungary, in the year 1000 and – since medieval times – a key symbolic touchstone in the constitution of state power.

Reading Interfaces: Inquiries at the Intersection of Literature and Technology

Electronic literature presents and generates literary performances that display, question, and critique ways of reading and modes of literary production in the digital age. This exhibition of electronic literature will display and discuss works of electronic and print literature and bring to attention the technologies central to their production. The accompanying colloquium will include public presentations on the history of the book, theories of electronic literature, and lectures by producers of electronic texts.

Who Started World War I? Centenary Debates about War Guilt and Meaning

A Niagara of new histories has greeted the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, and none more impressive or widely-read than Christopher Clark, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Harper, 2013). In his very title, Clark paints a portrait of European statesmen asleep at the wheel, stumbling blindly into a war that waking people would have avoided.

Literature, Sexuality, and the Postsecular: Intersections and Possibilities – A Workshop

What is “the postsecular,” and why should it matter to the study of literature and sexuality? Exploring various possible answers, this workshop emphasizes the significance of recent debates in secularization theory to scholarly analyses of non-normative and transnational representations of sexual subjectivities.

Religion and Secularism across the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Forum

A Baker-Nord Working Group Event

Over the past decade, numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have spoken of a “religious turn.” This pattern is characterized by a resurgent interest in interdisciplinary scholarship that revaluates central questions about the relationship between religion and secularism in the academy and in our objects of study.