The Culture & Society Colloquium at Washington and Lee University
The Culture &
Society Colloquium (CSC) is an interdisciplinary series
of informal colloquia featuring scholars at Washington and Lee or at nearby
schools who are working in the humanities and social sciences. Presentations focus on the circumstances, mechanisms, and
consequences of the production and dissemination of cultural products and
cultural practices of all kinds past and present,
highlighting the relations between such factors as social, political, or
religious institutions, literature and art, and economic or technological
systems.
Participants present their work-in-progress as a talk, followed by
discussion. It is an opportunity to air and discuss with colleagues work as it
is being developed, and is not meant to be a formal, public lecture.
Rather, it is an opportunity for participants to talk about the work
in which they are already engaged —
something from an article, chapter, or book
in progress.
The talk should situate the subject in relation to the colloquium's general theme, and make it comprehensible to a non-specialist academic audience. The idea is to stimulate interdisciplinary discussion and highlight shared interests. The diversity of background and research method of the participants offers a real advantage: the comments of colleagues in allied fields but focused in different areas or periods can point to broad issues and methodological considerations that a specialist readers might not bring into view.
Next Presentation: TBA
Past Presentations (with some links to related publications):
2008:
March 13
Mark Carey (Assistant Professor of
History)
[webpage]
"Glacier Cultures in the Andes: Disasters,
Science, and the Social Implications of Climate Change in Peru"
April 1
Ayşe Zarakol (Assistant Professor of Politics)
[webpage]
"Why so Stubborn? War-Crimes Denial in Turkey
and Japan"
[2008 International Studies Association mtg. program]
May 20
Patrick Hatcher (Instructor of Religion)
"Mission, Conscience, and Territory:
Reexamining Conversion in Early Islam"
October 22
Timothy Lubin (Associate Professor of Religion)
2006:
February 21
Harvey Markowitz (Visiting Professor of Religion)
"Medicine
Men: The Good, the Bad, and the Plastic"
May 9
Donald R. Davis, Jr. (Assi
May 25
Rina Williams (Associate
Director, Center for South Asian Studies, and Lecturer in Political Science,
University of Virginia)
"Gender, Nation, Religion: Intersecting
Identities in India's Personal Laws"
October 18
Jonathan Eastwood
(Assistant Professor of Sociology)
"Nationalism and the Sociology of the
Novel"
The talk revisits some classic
accounts of the "rise of the novel" and suggests that their economistic
reductionism leads them (a) to overstate the causal significance of early
capitalism and (b) to downplay the role that the emergence of national identity
played in problematizing the basic social categories that the early novel seeks
to rationalize. It will be argued that the emergence of nationalism itself
contributes to the rise of the novel.
November 9
Edwin D. Craun (Henry S. Fox, Jr. Professor of English)
"Fraternal Correction: Ethics and
Power Relations in Middle English Reformist Writing"
How can we think about a
religious/social practice that is constructed by texts in terms both intrinsic
to the texts and critical of how the practice operated within existing social
relations? This study's first two chapters marry sociological
analysis/theory (Jean and John Comaroff, Anne Swidler) and virtue ethics
(chiefly Alasdair MacIntyre) to analyze how the late medieval clergy created a
practice, fraternal correction of sin, that both licensed social criticism of
disciplinary superiors (laic of cleric, parish priest of bishop, citizen of
major or judge) and attempted to supervise it by inculcating ethical
constraints. As a literary historian and a historian of disciplinary
practices, I am eager to see how colleagues across the human sciences respond to
my twinned forms of analysis. Is this study coherent? Its theorists apt?
Might other theorists be useful, as well?
November 30
Hongchu Fu (Associate
Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures)
"A Play of Different Kind in
Classical Chinese Drama:
Reading the Yuan-Period Zaju Drama, 'Loyal and High-Minded Yu Rang
Swallows Charcoal'"
2005:
February 10
Hongchu Fu (Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures)
"In Memory of Jacques Derrida:
Deconstruction, Gödel’s Theorem and the Studies of Genre"
March 3
Bernard Means (Assistant Professor of Anthropology [then Adjunct
Professor of Anthropology, School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth
University])
"Communities in the Round: Anthropological Perspectives on
Ring-Shaped Villages of the Recent and Distant Past"
May 5
Leslie Cintron (Assistant Professor of Sociology)
"American Attitudes towards Work and Family Balance"
Cross-listed as a Women's Studies Colloquium
November 16
Tim Lubin (Associate Professor of Religion)
"Punishment and Expiation: Secular and Religious Forms
of Correction in Hindu Law"
November 30
Winston Davis (Jessie Ball duPont Professor of Religion)
"Does Religion Drive American Foreign Policy in the
Middle East? A Critique of Culturology"
2004:
January 27
Elisa DiCaprio (Visiting Professor of History)
"The Betrayal of Srebrenica: A Ten Year
Commemoration. A Photographic Exhibit Proposal"
This exhibit, which will open at Washington and Lee in January 2006, is
inspired by Prof. DiCaprio's current research project on the international
campaign for justice for Srebrenica and also by her recent collaboration with
Paula Allen, a human rights photographer. This fall, Prof. DiCaprio organized an
exhibit of Ms. Allen's photographs on the "disappeared" of Chile and related
educational programs at New York University.
February 24
Stephen Poulson (Visiting Professor
of Sociology)
"Shi’i Culture and Social
Movement Strategies: Using the Muharram Processionals to Frame
Contentious Action"
May 6
Winston Davis
(Jessie Ball duPont Professor of Religion)
"Ludwig Feuerbach's Second
Look at Religion: Phenomenology without Brackets"
October 28
Hongchu Fu (Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages
and Literatures)
"Nature,
Spontaneity and Logocentrism: A Reexamination of the Concept of Nature in
Chinese Literary Criticism"
November 11
Laura Galke
(Archaeology Research Assistant and Instructor)
"Strategies of Consumption and Display in a
Company Iron Mining Town: the Longdale Mining Community of Allegheny County,
Virginia"
2003:
February 4
Domnica Radulescu (Associate Professor of Romance Languages)
"Women as Creators of Humor"
April 8
Ellen Mayock (Associate Professor of Romance Languages)
"Constructing Nationalist Identity:
Bilingual Friends and Foes in Catalan Narrative"
April 23
Sascha Goluboff (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology)
"Are they Jews or Asians? A Cautionary Tale about Mountain
Jewish Ethnography"
May
1
Hongchu Fu (Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages
and Literatures)
"Imaging
Politics: The Case of Pan Jinlian in Chinese Drama"
May 29
Anna Brodsky (Associate Professor of Russian)
"The Construction of Nationalist Identity: Representations of the Current
War in Chechnya in Russian Prose"
[LINK]
October 9
October 30
November 13
2002:
February 26
Suzanne Keen
(Professor of English)
"Empathy and the Postcolonial Novel in English:
Authors, Readers, Markets, and the Problem
of Universality"
April 2
Praveena Gullapalli (Ph.D. candidate in archeology, University
of Pennsylvania)
"Culture through Technology
in Archaeology: The Case of Iron in Early India"
October 2
Tim Lubin
(Assistant Professor of Religion)
"Arya Identity and Brahmanical Knowledge in
Early South Asia"
October 30
Kevin Crotty
(Associate Professor of Classics)
"From Mythos to Logos and
Back Again: The Greek Case"
November 13
Françoise Frégnac-Clave (Associate Professor of Romance Languages)
"Traces of Celtic Other
World Representations in French Literature"
The CSC was founded by Tim Lubin (Department of Religion) in early 2002. From July 2003 to June 2005, the series was ably convened by Sascha Goluboff (Department of Sociology and Anthropology).