Newsletters Archive Fall 1996
Dialog 1
Letter from the Director, Tom Haskell
1995-1996 Conferences
1995-1996 Workshops and Study Groups
- Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Workshop (AMC)
- Asian Studies
- Continental Theory Workshop
- Feminist Reading Group (FRG)
- Medieval Studies Workshop
- Nineteenth Century Enquiry (NICE)
- Central European Study Group
- Study Group on Language and Music
- Judaic Studies Workshop
Late Editions Project: Annual Editorial Meeting/Symposium
Letter from the Director
Several problems cried out for attention when I became director of the Center for the Study of Cultures in early 1993. The first was simply to get the organization up and running again after the departure of its founding director, Mike Fischer. The strong foundations that Mike laid made the requisite jumpstart easy to administer.
Another task, highlighted by the Skura Committee in its review of the center in late 1992, was to regularize decision-making procedures and make the center's operations more transparent to its clientele. Various means to that end took shape in 1993 and 1994. They included the establishment of an advisory panel to help shape center policy, the publication of criteria for selection of Center Fellows, the development of an annual schedule for reviewing workshops and fellowship applications, and the adoption of various internal procedures for monitoring expenditures. The center also began publicizing its activities through periodic distribution of a calendar of events, the CSC Announcements.
The third task was to obtain adequate staff support. The center's bookkeeping had always been handled as a collateral duty by the office staff of the dean of the School of Humanities. The only other staff support available to the center was provided by a single graduate student assistant. By the end of 1994 it was clear that existing staff would no longer suffice. Five conferences, several of them quite large, were being planned for 1995-96. A new half-time position of assistant director was filled last fall by Pam Walker, a Rice Ph.D. in English. As assistant director, Walker takes over the daily management of the center, including its bookkeeping functions, and injects an invaluable element of continuity and "institutional memory" into all its activities. She also edits this newsletter and will help the center conduct a more systematic search for outside funding than it has been able to undertake in the past.
As I begin my fourth and last year as director, two needs remain unmet. The first is for space. The center occupies one office in Fondren barely big enough for two people to work. It needs a larger office and a seminar room for meetings. Eventually it should have a claim on several offices for visiting faculty. No progress can be expected on this front until the School of Humanities moves into the old chemistry building, three or four years from now. Once the center has its own space, the stage will be set for the sort of decisive transformation of the center's role that can only be achieved by acquisition of endowed funds sufficient to bring to the Rice campus two or three visiting faculty members every year for collaborative work. That, I take it, is the distinguishing feature of the most successful humanities/cultural studies centers. It could transform this one.
In the meantime, I am pleased with the steady growth of the center, which sponsored no fewer than 110 visitors to Rice during the past year, a record number. I am also pleased with the intellectual vitality of the work the center sponsors. On many occasions I have heard visitors to Rice express amazement about the frequency, the ease, and the high level of interdisciplinary conversation on this campus. Controversies that trigger demoralizing "culture wars" elsewhere promote fruitful, if impassioned, debate here. If proof of the center's success is wanted, we need look no further than the 1995-96 schedule of conferences, which touched on everything from exile and the effect of climate on culture, to historical interpretation, the body of Christ, and the place of phenomenology in Japan.
Events like these require major investments of time and energy by members of the Rice faculty. They also require financial resources. Funds from an expiring Rockefeller grant helped pay for Hamid Naficy's splendid conference on exile. A generous gift some years ago from Neil J. O'Brien covered all the expenses of David Nirenberg's wonderful sessions on the body of Christ. Thirty-five thousand dollars from the Mellon Foundation made possible my symposium on interpretation in history. The U.S. Forest Service provided $40,000 for Susan and Rod McIntosh's sessions on climate and culture. And by no means least is the generous support that President Gillis, Provost Auston, and Dean Brown have assigned to the program. Much is being done on this campus to right the ancient imbalance between the sciences and the liberal arts.
Yet however valuable this year's conferences have been, CSC's heart remains in the workshops and study groups. The energy that their members invest in them and the diligent labor performed by workshop coordinators, especially, are truly the lifeblood of the organization. It is at the level of the workshops that intellectual standards are set, minds are changed, and new projects launched. Accordingly, this first issue of the CSC newsletter devotes much space to the reports received from workshop and study group coordinators and documents the visitors that each group has brought to Rice this year. A principal function of the newsletter is to call attention to the really impressive work going on in these meetings, attract new recruits to them, and build an audience for the events they organize. Get involved in one, or organize a new group better suited to your interests!
Thomas L. Haskell
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History and the Limits of Interpretation
March 1996
Jointly sponsored by the CSC and the Department of History and funded by a $35,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, this interdisciplinary event was the center's most ambitious undertaking of the year. The conference featured as invited guests twenty-four leading scholars in history, philosophy, and literary criticism, brought together to debate whether there are limits to interpretation and, if so, what they are in the particular case of history.
The question of limits brought forth an abundance of rival perspectives. The papers of Joan Scott and Carol Quillen suggested that it might be undesirable even to raise the question of limits, lest doing so be taken as a license for repression. Other participants took it for granted that particular interpretations unavoidably presuppose limits of one kind or another. From that perspective, shared by those who organized the conference, the question is not whether to be for or against limits to interpretation, but how limits function, what they imply about the world we occupy, and what they signify about the credibility of historical knowledge.
"Experience," often cited as a basis for interpretation or a constraint on interpretive liberty, became one focal point of discussion. Frank Ankersmit held out the paradoxical prospect that antifoundationalism, if properly understood and fully embraced, leads not to skepticism (as friends and foes alike often assume) but to the possibility of unmediated experience of the real. Near the opposite end of the spectrum stood Scott, who pressed for recognition that individual experience is inescapably prefigured by the structurally induced effects of power and ideology. Papers by Jack Zammito and David Carr explored middle ground on this issue, granting that human experience is deeply influenced by structural circumstances but nonetheless crediting it with sufficient autonomy to continue serving as a touchstone of interpretation, albeit provisional and fallible.
In a session on literary criticism chaired by Frank Kermode, Alan Grob reaffirmed the interpretive limits set by simple fidelity to fact. Grob spotlighted several cases of egregiously licentious interpretation by scholars eager to do good in the present by condemning the evils of the past. Confronted with a choice between political efficacy and fidelity to the facts, Hayden White, speaking from the audience, came down stoutly for the former, declaring that criticism's first obligation was to be "custodial of utopian hope." In a contrasting mood, Dominick LaCapra faulted Lanzmann's Shoah for its tendency to "act out" rather than "work through" identification with Holocaust victims. LaCapra's stance raised interesting questions, as Richard Wolin observed, about the role of interpretive limits that are ethical rather than cognitive.
Both Steven Crowell and Jörn Rüsen stressed the constitutive role that ethical or normative commitments play in the writing of history, while differing mildly over the implications of these commitments for "objectivity." Raymond Martin brought into focus one strong current of opinion among conference participants when he suggested that the debate was moving away from the sensational extremes of the 1980s toward a narrower range of more complex positions. Yet Alan Megill's response &emdash; that he was "not all that happy about convergence; the center is boring" &emdash; had its supporters. The conference ended on a congenial note without anyone claiming to have the last word. Most of the papers and commentaries from the conference are accessible at the Center's website.
Invited participants were: Frank Ankersmit (history/philosophy, Groningen), David Carr (philosophy, Emory), Paul Conkin (history, Vanderbilt), Geoffrey Harpham (English, Tulane), Lynn Hunt (history, Pennsylvania), Hans Kellner (English, UT-Arlington), Frank Kermode (English, UH), Dominick LaCapra (history, Cornell), James Livingston (history, Rutgers), Wilfred McClay (history, Tulane), Raymond Martin (philosophy, Maryland), Allan Megill (history, Virginia), Nancy Partner (history, McGill), Jacques Revel (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Joan Scott (history, Institute for Advanced Study), Bonnie Smith (history, Rutgers), Jörn Rüsen (history/philosophy, Bielefeld), Michael Roth (history, Claremont), Richard Teichgraeber (history, Tulane), Brook Thomas (English, UC-Irvine), Richard Vann (history, Wesleyan), Irmline Veit-Brause (history, Deakin), Robert Westbrook (history, Rochester), and Hayden White (history of consciousness, UC-Santa Cruz).
Rice faculty participants included: Judith Brown (dean of humanities), Carl Caldwell (history), Steven Crowell (philosophy), Alan Grob (English), Thomas Haskell (history), Helena Michie (English), Carol Quillen (history), Daniel Sherman (French studies/history), Martin Wiener (history), and Richard Wolin (history), and John Zammito (history).
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Climate Change in History and Prehistory
September 1995
With funding from the U.S. Forest Service and under the auspices of the CSC, Joseph Tainter (U.S. Forest Service) and Rod and Susan McIntosh (both in anthropology) organized this September conference. Two current trends in scholarship provided the context of the event. One is palaeo-climatologists' sense of an imminent "break-through recognition" of the causes and rhythms of global climate change through planetary orbital modulation and solar radiation. The second is historians' and archaeologists' complementary recognition that past societies responded to climate change not passively but, rather, by treating information about climate according to their models of the environment. Thirteen scholars representing all parts of the world attended three days of closed sessions at The Woodlands Conference Center. Presentations ranged from developments in recent palaeoclimatic models to the social production of social memory of climate risk. The conference ended with a formal presentation of results to the Rice community during an afternoon seminar in the Kyle Morrow Room and with a series of formal concept definitions and recommendations for policy makers. Presenters included: Robert Dunbar (Rice), Jeffrey Dean (Arizona), Sander Van der Leeuw (University of Paris), John Johnson (Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History), Joseph Tainter (U.S. Forest Service), Roderick McIntosh (Rice), Téréba Togola (Institut des Sciences Humaines, Mali), Fekri Hassan (Institute of Archaeology, University College, London), Joel Gunn (North Carolina), David Freidel (Southern Methodist), Carole Crumley (North Carolina), and Cho-yun Hsu (Chinese University of Hong Kong and Pittsburgh). The papers, edited by the conference organizers, will appear as a book and are currently under consideration by Columbia University Press.
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House, Home, Homeland: A Media Studies Symposium on Exile
October 27-29, 1995
Funded by the CSC and the Department of Art and Art History, Hamid Naficy (art and art history) organized this multimedia and multidisciplinary symposium. Over twenty scholars came on October 27-29, 1995, to discuss how people design, inhabit, and imagine their homes and identities during a time when global changes in politics, technology, and social structures are producing massive shifts in capital and power and displacing entire populations. The symposium, held in the Media Center, opened with two exhibits. "Cultural Baggage," which was curated by Bill Thomas, displayed photography-based works by nineteen United States artists, all concerned with issues of exile, identity, and environment. "Turtle Boat Head," David Chung's multimedia installation, represented the experience of a Korean immigrant who owns an inner-city convenience store and deals daily with the cultural conflicts that characterize urban America and inform the American dream of "home." Curated by Kimberly Davenport, the installation marked the first time that Chung's work has been shown in this region.
The seven-panel scholars' forum drew an audience ranging from fifty to seventy people. Participating scholars included a number of Rice faculty: Julie Taylor and Ben Lee (anthropology); Richard Ingersoll (architecture); Diane Dillon, William Camfield, Brian Huberman, and Thomas McEvilley (art and art history); José Aranda, Betty Joseph, and Susan Lurie (English); Bernard Aresu (French studies); Margaret Eifler (German and Slavic studies); and Ed Cox, Patricia Seed, and Richard Wolin (history). In addition, scholars from other universities in the United States, Europe, and Cuba participated, among them the following: Ella Shohat (film and cultural studies, CUNY-Staten Island), Vivian Sobchack (film studies, UCLA), Rosa Linda Fregoso (women's studies/Chicana studies, UC-Davis), Iain Chambers (Instituto Universitario Orientale, Naples, Italy), George Lipsitz (ethnic studies, UC-San Diego), Roberto Segre (architectural history, Instituto Politecnico Jose Echeverria, Havana, Cuba), Teshome Gabriel (film studies, UCLA), Margaret Morse (television studies, UC-Santa Cruz), and Steven Mintz (history, UH). Over four hundred people attended the keynote address, which was delivered by Homi K. Bhabha (Chicago) as a Rice University Presidential Lecture.
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Body of Christ
November 10-11, 1995
On November 10th and 11th, 1995, the Center for the Study of Cultures in conjunction with the Neil J. O'Brien Endowment sponsored the first Neil J. O'Brien Symposium in Medieval Studies. Organized by David Nirenberg (history), this was the first of the interdisciplinary symposia in medieval studies made possible by Mr. O'Brien's generous gift; others will follow every three years. This year's theme, "The Body of Christ in the Late Middle Ages," was chosen to represent a cross-section of a burgeoning field that has lately produced research on topics as varied as eucharistic devotion, women's spirituality, mysticism, ritual violence, and Jewish-Christian relations. The O'Brien Symposium brought scholars from the fields of art history, history, Judaic studies, literary criticism, musicology, and religious studies. Among the main participants were Michael T. Davis (Mount Holyoke), Ellen Ross (Swarthmore), Robert Stacey (University of Washington, Seattle), Margot Fassler (Yale), Sarah Beckwith (Duke), Miri Rubin (Pembroke College, Oxford), and Daniel Lasker (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev).
Turnout was high, with more than 130 people the first day, and never fewer than eighty. Owing to publicity in local churches, on KUHF, and in the Houston Chronicle, a substantial portion of the audience came from outside the academy. Another portion of the audience consisted of students from Humanities 103, the foundations course in medieval civilization taught by Linda Neagley (art and art history) and David Nirenberg; students were required to write papers that related course material to some of the talks.
The academic portion of the audience, while including scholars from institutions on the east and west coasts, was drawn mainly from local colleges. As a result, the symposium established new ties among local medievalists (particularly those at Rice and St. Thomas), and also led to some novel research and programming. For example, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will mount an exhibition entitled "The Body of Christ in the Arts of Europe and New Spain, 1150-1800." Scheduled to open December 14, 1997, this may be the first exhibition dedicated to the topic. The catalogue will be the collaborative effort of the exhibit curator, James Clifton (director of the Blaffer Foundation and curator of Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts), Linda Neagley, and David Nirenberg. The project exemplifies the kind of work the O'Brien Symposium was designed to foster: innovative, interdisciplinary, and aimed at a broad audience.
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Visualizing South Asian Diasporas
March 29-30, 1996
Anthropology graduate students Lamia Karim and Nityanand Deckha, in collaboration with George Marcus and Hamid Naficy, organized this symposium with departmental and CSC funds. The event occurred on March 29th and 30th, and drew a large and diverse audience, with an average of fifty to sixty people at each panel. Attendees came from UH, Texas A & M, UT-Austin, and from South Asian communities within Houston. The event comprised seven panels that were structured around the following contemporary video documentaries by Americans, Britons, and Canadians of South Asian descent: Dina Hossain's Aleya: A Bangladeshi Poet in America, Gurinder Chadha's I'm British But, Pratibha Parmar's Khush, Indu Krishnan's Knowing Her Place, Srinivas Krishna's Masala, Vivek Renjen Bald's Taxi-vala/Auto-biography, Prajna Paramita Parasher and Deb Ellis's Unbidden Voices, and Meena Nanji's Voices of the Morning. The videos were selected because they probe questions of alterity, gender, race, labor, cultural hybridity, multiculturalism, and nationalism. Inderpal Grewal (women's studies, San Francisco State) gave the keynote address, and guest panelists included the New York film and videomakers Vivek Renjen Bald and Dina Hossain, Kamala Visweswaran (anthropology, UT-Austin), and novelist Bapsi Sidhwa (Houston). Rice faculty participants were Betty Joseph (English) and Hamid Naficy (art and art history). In addition to Karim and Deckha, Rice graduate students who participated were Deepa Reddy and Denise Youngblood (anthropology) and Padmaja Challakere, Stephen da Silva, and Mousumi Roy Chowdhury (English).
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Phenomenology and Metaphysics: East and West
April 5-7, 1996
Organized by Steven Crowell (philosophy), this conference was held on April 5-7, 1996. Leading scholars in the phenomenological tradition, drawn from North America and Japan, met to consider the implications of the phenomenological method (as developed by Edmund Husserl and modified by Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others) for such traditional metaphysical issues as the nature of being, the philosophical significance of scientific thought, the ontological status of the "self," ego," and "freedom," and the ultimate ground of social reality. A major aim of the conference was to raise these issues both as they are familiarly addressed within the tradition of Western (Greek) metaphysics and also as they emerge from Japanese spiritual traditions (for example, Buddhism) and among Japanese philosophers in dialogue with German and French phenomenologists. Hiroshi Kojima (emeritus, Yokohama), whose work exemplifies this sort of cross-cultural dialogue, delivered the keynote address, "Perception and Imagination: The Contact Point of Phenomenology and Metaphysics." Kojima demonstrated how the "psychological" approach to perception and imagination characteristic of Husserl and his early followers (an approach which made any move to "metaphysical" conclusions problematic) can be reinterpreted from within a Japanese conceptual framework such that the apparent gap between individual psychology and ultimate reality is spanned with phenomenological insight.
Each of five sessions paired a Japanese and a North American philosopher according to connections in their topics; discussion, orchestrated by session chairs, was mainly in English and German. Invited participants included Ryoichi Hosokawa (Kyushu), Anthony Steinbock (Southern Illinois), Ronald Bruzina (Kentucky), Tullio Maranhao (Minnesota), Akira Hasegawa and Michiko Hasegawa (Tokyo), and James Mensch (St. Francis Xavier, Nova Scotia).
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1995-1996 Workshops and Study Groups
Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Workshop (AMC)
Coordinator: Hilary Mackie (Hispanic and Classical Studies)
The group devoted most of its meetings to members' work in progress, considering papers by Don Morrison (on Plato's account of happiness), Michael Maas (on ancient ethnography in the late antique period), Hilary Mackie (on Helen and the poetics of the Odyssey), Harvey Yunis (on problems of genre in the Alexandrian commentator Didymos), and Raphael Freundlich (on the meaning of the best arete, or 'excellence,' in the archaic Greek lyric poet Tyrtaeus).
AMC also hosted seven guest speakers. In the fall, Deborah Lyons (Rochester) lectured on "womanly gifts," which explored women and exchange in ancient literature and myth, and David Satran (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) spoke on the way the practice of lying is evaluated in both Greek and the Old Testament traditions. During the spring, Josiah Ober (Princeton) elucidated Aristotle's Politics in terms of Aristotle's awareness of contemporary political events, James Tatum (Dartmouth) probed similarities and differences between two accounts of the experience of war in "A Meeting of Priam and Achilles: America War Memorials in Vietnam," Ian Morris (Stanford) presented "The Cultural Origins of Greek Democracy," Ineke Sluiter (Free University, Amsterdam) presented an analysis of the uses of the Homeric text by later Greek theoreticians of rhetoric, and, finally, Paula Perlman (UT-Austin) lectured on ancient piracy with "Cretans Ever Brigands? Ethnic Stereotyping and Causation in Ancient Greek Historiography."
During 1996-97, AMC's main activity will be a small spring conference on "The Classics, the Humanities Curriculum, and Rice." The purpose is to explore what roles classical literature, art, and history should continue to play in our humanities curricula, an especially pressing issue as Rice reshapes its humanities foundation course.
Asian Studies
Coordinator: Richard J. Smith (History)
Supported by the CSC and the dean of humanities, and in cooperation with other university programs, departments, and centers, the Asian studies program has embarked on several related projects: (1) an Asian Studies Workshop, devoted to hosting guest speakers and promoting scholarly discussion among the Rice Asian studies faculty and graduate students; (2) an effort to establish a higher profile for Asian studies at Rice and in the Houston community; and (3) an effort to internationalize the curriculum at Rice and to promote greater interdisciplinary cooperation. Faculty directly involved in one or more of these projects included: Lilly Chen (linguistics), Anne Klein (religious studies), Benjamin Lee (anthropology), Douglas Mitchell (linguistics), Nanxiu Qian (linguistics), Richard Smith (history), Yumi Soeshima (linguistics), Steve Tyler (anthropology), Fred Von Der Mehden (political science), Richard Wilson (art and art history), Insun Yang (linguistics), and Ellen Zhang (religious studies).
The Asian studies program sponsored nine guests. In the fall, Chen Feng (Manheim) met with the Asian Studies faculty, and Ross Terrill (Harvard) gave the talk "A Giant Trembles: The Issues of Democracy and National Unity in China's Future." Seven lecturers filled the spring roster: Mayfair Yang (UC-Santa Barbara) spoke on "Tradition and the Discourse of Modernity in China" and "Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai," Brantly Womack (Virginia) on "China and Vietnam: Most Alike, Very Different," Kamala Visweswaran (UT-Austin) on "Talking Race," Prasenjit Duara (Chicago) on "Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of Middle Class Woman in Modern China," and Ackbar Abbas (Hong Kong) on "Hong Kong Cultural Studies." In addition, the workshop sponsored a symposium on "Rethinking Asian Studies: The Challenge of Multiculturalism." Several distinguished visiting scholars were featured: Leo Ou-fan Lee (East Asian studies, Harvard), Dilip Gaonkar (cultural studies, Northwestern), Jack Tchen (Asian-American studies, Queens College, CUNY), and Zha Jianying (author of the acclaimed book China Pop).
A truly international curriculum is an interdisciplinary one that situates area studies within the complex processes of globalization. In its effort to internationalize the curriculum at Rice, the Asian studies faculty hopes to exploit several advantages that Rice enjoys. One is the lack of deeply entrenched impediments to curriculum innovations. Another is the recent establishment of institutes and centers intended to encourage inter-disciplinarity. A third is Rice's location in one of the world's most rapidly internationalizing cities, with an Asian population of about 200,000. The university itself boasts a substantial student body of Asian descent.
The goal of the Asian studies faculty is to develop a "post-area studies" program that would entail collaboration with a wide range of foreign colleagues and faculty at select American universities. Allies in this enterprise already include Professors Leo Lee, Dilip Gaonkar, Jack Tchen, and Ackbar Abbas. With these scholars' assistance, Rice faculty have submitted proposals to several funding organizations in an effort to establish a consortium of universities and research centers. The focus is on the ways that local, national, and transnationial processes are changing Asia. By sponsoring the collaborative organization of data archives, teaching resources, exchange programs, conferences, and visiting-scholar programs, Rice perhaps can create a new model for international scholarly cooperation.
Continental Theory Workshop
Coordinator: Lane Kauffmann (Hispanic and Classical Studies)
The workshop studied classical and contemporary theories of the sublime. The concept of the sublime has been at the forefront of interdisciplinary debates in the past two decades, owing largely to its importance in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and in German Romantic literary theory and, more recently, in French poststructuralist reinterpretations of both the Kantian and the Romantic legacies.
The group first read Jean-François Lyotard's, "The Interest of the Sublime"; Jean-Luc Nancy's, "The Sublime Offering"; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's, "Sublime Truth"; and Jacob Rogozinski's, "The Gift of the World." These were followed by sections from "Analytic of the Sublime" in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and several of Friedrich Schiller's essays on pathos and the sublime. The group next examined two recent views on Kantian and Romantic aesthetics of the sublime: Samuel Weber's, "The Foundering of Aesthetics: Thoughts on the Current State of Comparative Literature" and Paul De Man's, "Hegel on the Sublime." Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's The Literary Absolute: the Theory of Literature in German came next, and then Friedrich Schlegel's "Dialogue and Poetry." The final readings were recent overviews of German Romanticism: Maurice Blanchot's "The Atheneum" and Susan Bernstein's "Re-re-re-reading Jena." Tacking among ancient, modern, and contemporary texts proved helpful in historicizing the category of the sublime and the traditions in which it has figured.
Regular participants were Rob Bledsoe (German and Slavic studies), Steve Crowell (philosophy), Lane Kauffmann, Harris Rosenstein (independent scholar), Harvey Yunis (Hispanic and classical studies), and Jack Zammito (history). In November, the group sponsored Tom Sheehan (philosophy, Loyola University-Chicago), who gave the lecture "Heidegger's New Aspect: Temporality and the Genesis of Being and Time."
The workshop's topic for 1996-97 is irony, which, like the sublime, has recently been at the center of much interdisciplinary discussion, and which, also like the sublime, should lend itself well to the workshop's preferred strategy of moving back and forth between "classical" discussions (such as those of Socrates, Kierkegaard, Schlegel) and "contemporary" ones (such as those of Jenkelevitch, Rorty, Booth).
Feminist Reading Group (FRG)
Coordinators: Diane Dillon (Art and Art History) and Dan Sherman (French Studies)
The FRG followed two trajectories, a lecture series entitled "Feminist Perspectives," in which scholars from different disciplines presented new feminist work, and a series of presentations and discussions on issues in contemporary motherhood. The first speakers in the Feminist Perspectives series were Claire Richter Sherman (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.), whose talk was "A Field for their Efforts: Woman Archeologists and Art Historians in the United States, 1890-1940" and Richard Okada (Princeton), who spoke about "The Comfort Woman in Japanese Culture." A spring focus on modern French history resulted in two lectures: "Rereading Feminist History" by Joan Wallach Scott (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) and "Gender and the Writing of History" by Bonnie Smith (Rutgers University). In addition, Mary Louise Roberts (Stanford) spoke about "Subversive Copy: Feminist Journalism at the Fin-de-Siecle."
The group's exploration of contemporary motherhood featured a lecture by Helena Michie (English) entitled "Detecting Infertility: Murder and the Maternal Imperative." Sociologist Sharon Hays (Virginia), also lectured, entitling her talk "The Cultural Contradictions of Contemporary Motherhood."
Medieval Studies Workshop
Coordinator: David Nirenberg (History)
The main activity of the workshop was mounting a conference entitled "The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages," which brought together leading scholars from a variety of fields (architecture, music, religious studies, history, philosophy, Judaic studies), all working on different aspects of corporeality in late medieval religiosity. (See conference report on p. 3-4.)
Linda Neagley will act as coordinator during David Nirenberg's 1996-97 leave. She and other members of the workshop are exploring ways to create a speaker series which will be closely tied to undergraduate courses in the major.
Nineteenth Century Enquiry (NICE)
Coordinator: Diane Dillon (Art and Art History)
Workshop participants focused on Romanticism. Fall sessions were devoted to a discussion of Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology, an influential work in the field of Romantic literary studies, and to two guest lectures, "Romantic Hermeneutics: Nietzsche, Gadamer, Derrida" by Ernst Behler (Washington) and "Situatedness: Another Post-Modern Condition" by David Simpson (Colorado). Alan Grob's paper "William and Dorothy: Wordsworth and the Hermen-eutics of Disparagement" was the subject of the first spring meeting. Subsequently, Nicholas Roe (St. Andrews, Scotland) spoke about "John Keats' Green World," and Diane Dillon gave a talk entitled "Body Language: Spectacle and Spectatorship at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893."
Regular attendees were Robert Bledsoe (German and Slavic studies), Steven Crowell (philosophy), Scott Derrick (English), Alan Grob (English), Thad Logan (English), Helena Michie (English), Jack Zammito (history), and Diane Dillon.
Central European Study Group
Coordinator: Gale Stokes (History)
In the fall, Gale Stokes presented his paper "The Yugoslav Crisis and European Security," Tanya Dunlap (graduate student, history) discussed her experiences as a Fulbright scholar in Romania, and Ewa Thompson (German and Slavic studies) gave an analysis of the recent Polish presidential elections. Spring activities included viewing the Macedonian film Before the Rain and hosting the lecture "Polish-Russian Relations up to the Twentieth Century" by Andrzej Nowak (visiting professor of German and Slavic studies). The group also hosted two guest lecturers: Katherine Verdery (Johns Hopkins), who spoke on "The Caritas Pyramid Scheme in post-1989 Romania," and Norman Naimark (history, Stanford), whose talk was "The Soviet Occupation of Germany and the Question of Stalinism."
The group will continue its program of lecturers and, in the spring of 1997, will sponsor a meeting at Rice of the Southwest Conference on Slavic studies, a small, twenty-year-old organization of regional scholars.
Study Group on Language and Music
Coordinator: Sydney Lamb (Linguistics)
The group discussed interactions between language and music, especially in folk songs and opera. An in-depth study of Wagner's Ring cycle will occupy members in the fall of 1996, and they also plan to meet with the folk singer and songwriter Tom Paxton, when he comes to Houston for a concert.
Judaic Studies Workshop
Coordinator: Shaul Magid (Religious Studies)
The workshop sponsored two lectures by Professor Elliot R. Wolfson (NYU), a leading scholar in Jewish mysticism and the author of Through A Speculum That Shines, which won the 1996 A. A. R. Book Award for History of Religions and the 1996 National Jewish Book Award. Professor Wolfson's lectures were "Orality and Literacy in Medieval Jewish Mysticism" and "The Construction of Gender in Kabbalah."
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Late Editions Project: Annual Editorial Meeting/Symposium
May 4, 1996Edited by George Marcus and published by the University of Chicago Press, Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century is a series of volumes intended to document emergent cultural formations as the twentieth century comes to an end. Each year, with support from the CSC, participants involved in the production of the immediately forthcoming volume meet at Rice to critique each other's contributions. The eighteen authors of essays to be included in The "Willies"&emdash; Conspiracy Theories at Century's End, the sixth volume, gathered on May 4th. Conspiracy thinking figures prominently among fringe groups, militias, and cults, but it also characterizes scientists, regulators, therapists, bureaucrats, and others working within institutions of rationality and instrumental control. Intended to investigate conspiracy theories in domains of the rational where they are not usually expected, The "Willies," due in the fall of 1997, will include papers by the following: Scott Lukas (Valparaiso), Michael Fortun (Hamilton), Kim Laughlin (Rensselaer Polytechnic), Chris Pound (Rice), Jamer Hunt (Rice), Myanna Lahsen (Advanced Study Program, National Center for Atmospheric Research), Michael F. Brown (Williams), James Faubion (Rice), Andrea Aureli (Rice), Robine Wagner-Pacifici (Swarthmore), Bruce Grant (Swarthmore), Gudrun Klein (Rice), Thomas Dumm (Amherst), William Chaloupka (Montana), Douglas Holmes (Emory), and Ron Burnett (McGill). Discussants at this year's meeting were: Michael Fischer (MIT), Katie Stewart (UT-Austin), and Luis Roberto Cardoso (University of Brasilia).
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