2015-2016

Graduate Student Work-in-Progress – The Amateur Instrument: Teenagers, the Electric Bass, and Garage Bands 1958-1964

This lecture examines how the electric bass transitioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s to its current position as rock’s primary low-end instrument. Through an exploration of the musical, social, and economic culture of American teenagers, Brian Wright, a graduate student in the Department of Music, argues that the normalization of the electric bass resulted from the confluence of three distinct historical trends: the popularity of instrumental rock bands like the Ventures, a grassroots influx of self-taught amateur musicians, and the prosperous economic climate of the late 1950s.

Faculty-Work-in-Progress – Attempt at a Mythology

What place do our oldest stories have in twenty-first century poetry? How can contemporary lyric make and unmake myths of its own? In this talk on his manuscript in progress, SAGES Fellow and poet Dave Lucas calls upon the wisdom and failures of these texts to reckon with our own moment in human history, in which we seem collectively balanced on the brink of anthropological and ecological disaster of mythic proportions.

Graduate Student Work-in-Progress – Global Fictions, Religious Violence, and Secularism’s Antinomies of Value

For several contemporary novelists, secularism and globalization collide in a way that recasts sociopolitical debates as questions of aesthetic value. By configuring religious practices as models for aesthetic perception, transnational writers such as Salman Rushdie, Mohsin Hamid, and Nadine Gordimer transform contemporary anxieties about religious violence by highlighting art’s vulnerability to the violence of markets and states.

Remembering War – Keynote Address: Moral Injury and War

What is it about the experience of war that can ruin the lives of the men and women whom we send off to fight? The standard definition of post-traumatic stress disorder is too narrow to account for the psychological wounds inflicted in combat. In his keynote address Jonathan Shay discusses how culture, social systems, mind and body are all implicated when moral injury is the consequence of war. Shay is a doctor and clinical psychiatrist, who is best known for his books, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, which compare the experiences of Vietnam veterans with the descriptions of war and homecoming in the works of Homer. Shay is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellowship and the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice. 

Film Screening and Panel Discussion – May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970

2016 CLEVELAND HUMANITIES FESTIVAL: REMEMBERING WAR

Screening of the award-winning documentary film May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970. The film is based on the play May 4th Voices, which comes from the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, a project that collects and provides access to personal accounts of the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State and their aftermath. A panel discussion will immediately follow the screening. Participants will include the playwright David Hassler, Jonathan Shay, and Shannon French of CWRU.

Under Cover of War: The Armenian Genocide and Its Continuing Ramifications

World War I provided the cover for the ultranationalist “Young Turk” dictatorship of the Ottoman Empire to take brutal measures to eliminate the native Armenian population. Not only did more than half of the Armenian inhabitants, 1.5 million perish, but the Armenian people was dispossessed of its homeland of several thousand years. Richard Hovannisian, Professor Emeritus at UCLA and Adjunct Professor at USC working with the Shoah Foundation, discusses the reasons for, and the continuing consequences of the Armenian Genocide, including its direct relationship to the Holocaust and other genocides.

Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women’s Voices Lecture – Mourning for Lost Art

In times of war, why do armies destroy cultural artefacts? And what does it mean when we, far away onlookers, mourn that destruction even as lives are being lost? In this lecture, Pakeistani novelist Kamila Shamsi looks at the role of culture, the threat it poses to those who are fighting for an ideology, and the ethics of our reaction to that destruction.  It also asks what the word ‘lost’ means in relation to art. 

Feeding War: Gender, Health, and the Mobilized Kitchen in WWI Germany

Heather R. Perry, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, will share her research on World War 1’s impact on the homefront in Germany. Perry’s work provides an overview on medicine, population health, and public policies in wartime, with more in-depth scrutiny of how women and their families coped with privations that impacted their health and well-being. This event is co-sponsored by the Case Western Reserve University Dittrick Medical History Center and is the Center’s 2016 Handerson Lecture.

The Baker-Nord Distinguished Faculty Lecture – Thirty Four Miles from Kent State: CWRU and the Vietnam War

While not Berkeley or Columbia, Case Western Reserve University became a visible part of American campus unrest in May 1970 when students blocked traffic on Euclid Avenue in the wake of the shootings at nearby Kent State University.  This incident and the student strike that followed serve as the center points of what some remember as a brief campus flirtation with radical protest.   Yet, the story of change and protest at CWRU is much deeper.   In this presentation John Grabowski, CWRU’s Krieger-Mueller Joint Professor in History and Historian and Senior Vice President for Research and Publications at the Western Reserve Historical Society, examines what happened at CWRU in the 1960s and early 1970s during the time of an unpopular war, a recent federation of two academic traditions, and unrest, violence, and poverty in the neighborhoods adjacent to the campus.

The Wades in Wartime – 1830-1945

The name Wade is familiar to many in northeast Ohio who enjoy Wade Park, the area surrounding Wade Lagoon, or those who attend Wade Oval Wednesdays.  University Circle is a nationally and internationally respected cultural center thanks, in part, to the generosity and influence of the Wade family.  The 9000+ pages of the Jeptha Homer Wade Family Papers, 1771-1957 in the archives of the Cleveland History Center at WRHS consist of correspondence, diaries, travel journals, autobiographical sketches, deeds, drawings, financial records, and scrapbooks that can be mined shed light on a wide range of topics.  In her presentation, Holly Witchey, Director of The Wade Project at Western Reserve Historical Society, will focus on the service-related and wartime experiences of five generations of Wades.