Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Edinburgh)
June 28, 2018, 4–6 p.m. (c.t.), SB II, 01-531 (Colonel-Kleinmann-Weg 2)
This talk will introduce audiences to the drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, mixed-media installations and performance art created by Black British artists living and working across the Black Diaspora. Black artists betray a lifelong determination to come to grips with hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories by developing experimental art practices.
For more information see the poster.
Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Laura Stevens (U Tulsa)
June 25, 2018, 12 p.m.–2 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum I, P 5
This lecture will provide an introduction to the Mohawk People, who called themselves “Kanienkehaka,” or “People of the Flint.“ The Easternmost tribe of the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee confederacy, the Mohawks were powerful and pivotal figures in the complex and violent landscape of colonial America. After considering some of their history and customs, this lecture will focus on a visit of 3 Mohawk and 1 Mahican ambassadors to London in 1710. An important public event that shaped English attitudes to Native Americans for years to come, this visit also generated a variety of literature and encouraged English missionary efforts to the Mohawk Nation. We will conclude by considering the importance of Mohawk diplomacy, mobility, and adaptability to what Native author Gerald Vizenor has called “Native survivance“ in the twenty-first century.
Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Alan Lessoff (Illinois State University)
June 28, 2018, 6–8 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum I, P 15
In recent years, an environmental perspective on urban history has been transforming both urban and environmental history, by emphasizing the city as an especially intense form of human interaction with nature, rather than a site distinct from or opposed to nature. This session considers the variety of new perspectives on both cities and the environment that emerge when one researches cities as features within and influences upon the environment.
For more information see the poster.
Events, General, Lectures, News
Peter W. Marx (Universität zu Köln)
June 18, 2018, 6-8 p.m. (c.t.), 00.212 (Philo II)
Book Launch & Talk
Please find more information on this event on the poster.
Please note: The event will be held in German.
Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Michael Boyden (Uppsala University)
June 18, 2018, 12-2 p.m., P 5 (Philosophicum)
Environmental humanists routinely take their departure from the romantic ecology of the mid-
nineteenth century, dismissing earlier climate theories as racist, unscientific, or overly impressionistic. Drawing on a number of salient examples, this lecture revalues the pre-1850 period as one of intense climatic sensibility in American literary culture. It argues that early climate theories fused science and sentiment, culture and climate in ways that citizen science, public health, epigenetics, and new materialist philosophy are aspiring to do at the present juncture. Moreover, unlike modern climate science, with its reliance on statistics, remote sensing, and performance indexes, these climate theories – often anachronistically understood as environmental determinism – eschewed philosophical speculation and prioritized experiential, sensory knowledge as a crucial interface between the emotions, thought, and the natural world. The oft-lamented dualism of Western philosophy, which has been taken as the root of our troubled relation to the environment, was less pronounced in the climatic doctrines that we tend to consign to a naïve, predisciplinary phase in the history of climate awareness than in current debates on global warming. The lecture thus offers a plea for more historical awareness in the climate debate and warns against overly monolithic narratives of ecological modernization.
Michael Boyden is Associate Professor of American Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History (Leuven UP, 2009). He has a new book project underway entitled Climate and Sensibility in American Literature, 1780-1850.
You can find the event poster here.
