The Humanities Center has scheduled 63 talks to be held on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
All lectures will be held in 2339 FAB from 12:30-1:30 unless otherwise announced.

Download schedule as a .pdf file

Click Brown Bag title for abstract.

FALL SEMESTER

• September 11 - Robert Burgoyne, Professor, English, “World Trade Center and United 93 - Traumatic Historical Film?”
• September 12 - Sharon F. Lean, Assistant Professor, Political Science, “Protest and the Public Sphere in Mexico”
• September 18 - Susan Frekko, Lecturer, Anthropology, “Ideologies of Language in Catalonia”
• September 19 - Max Nelson, Associate Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Windsor, “300 and the Ancient and Modern Idealization of the Spartans”
• September 25 - Ljiljana Progovac, Professor, English, “Sex and Syntax: Explaining Human Grammars through Evolutionary Forces”
• September 26 - Kathryne Lindberg, Professor, English, & Thomas Featherstone, Archivist III, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, “Shot in Silence: Labor Photography and Commentary in Black and Red, 1932-34”
• October 2 - Karen Tonso, Associate Professor, Education & Jorge Prosperi, Detroit Country Day, “Poetics from the Heart”
• October 3 - Ken Walters, Associate Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures,“Bearding Brutus: Paradigmatic Pressure and the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic” CANCELLED
• October 9 - Charles Stivale, Distinguished Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “Boyz 2 Men: The Collaborative Erotics of the Brothers Goncourt”
• October 10 - Jeff Rebudal, Assistant Professor, Dance, “Reinventing Opera: The Role of Dance and Choreography in Contemporary Opera Productions”
• October 16 - Thomas Kohn, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “The Stagecraft of Seneca”
• October 17 - Arifa Javed, Lecturer, Sociology, “Parenting and Parallel Socialization among Immigrant Children”
• October 23 - Mary Garrett, Associate Professor, Communication, & Haiyong Liu, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “Translations before the Translation”
• October 24 - Brad Roth, Associate Professor, Political Science and Law, “Coming to Terms with Ruthlessness: Sovereign Equality and the Limits of International Criminal Justice”
• October 30 - Terese Volk, Associate Professor, Music “The Works Progress Administration Manuscript Collection in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Music Library”
• October 31 - Heather Dillaway, Assistant Professor, Sociology, “What is ‘Successful Aging’ in Michigan Communities?”
• November 6 - Elizabeth Faue, Professor, History, “The Shaping Up Years: Labor Reporting, Working-Class Culture Politics, and Labor Movement Survival after World War I”
• November 7 - Jose A. Rico-Ferrer, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “The Spanish Galateo: When Jokes and Laughter Become a Serious Matter”
• November 13 - Lavinia Hart, Assistant Professor, Theatre & Christopher Collins, Associate Professor, Music, “‘Translations’ by Brian Friel: Directing an Interdepartmental and Community Collaboration to Expand the Theme of Translation on Multiple Levels”
• November 14 - Avis Vidal, Professor, Geography and Urban Planning, “Contemporary Approaches to Neighborhood Revitalization”
• November 20 - Mame Jackson, Professor, Art and Art History, “The Artist as Citizen -- Tyree Guyton and His Heidelberg Project”CANCELLED
• November 21 - Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, “Intimacies: Sleep, Families, and Disease”
• November 27 - Elena Past, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “The Dying Diva: Violent Ends for Clara Calamai in Visconti’s Ossessione and Argento’s Profondo rosso”
• November 28 - Suzanne Hilgendorf, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “International Media and the English Language: The Linguistic Impact of Hollywood in Germany”
• December 4 - Lothar Spang, Librarian IV, University Libraries & Deborah Tucker, Librarian II, University Libraries, “Chapbooks: Institutional Repository Inspires Urban K-12 Student Poets”
• December 5 - Myra Tawfik, Professor, Law, University of Windsor, “A Connecticut Yankee in Montreal: Mark Twain’s Adventures with Canadian Copyright Law”
• December 11 - John Corvino, Associate Professor, Philosophy, “The Best Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage (and why it doesn’t work)”
• December 12 - Anca Vlasopolos, Professor, English, “The New Bedford Samurai: Reading, Discussion, and Book Signing"
• December 18 - Ross J. Pudaloff, Associate Professor, English, “We have to live upon what we can catch’: Mordecai Noah and She Would Be a Soldier”
  

WINTER SEMESTER

• January 8 - Michael Scrivener, Professor and Guggenheim Awardee, English, “Rosa Matilda and ‘Jew’ King: Poetry, Gothic Novels and Gonefs in the Romantic Era”
• January 9 - Mysoon Rizk, Associate Professor, Art, University of Toledo, “Why Look at “Animals in Pants”? The Posthumanist Case of David Wojnarowicz”
• January 15 - Robert Nelson, Professor, History, University of Windsor, “A German in the North American Prairies: Max Sering and the Concept of Inner Colonization”
• January 16 - Cynthia Erb, Associate Professor, English, “Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields: Functions of the Child Star in New Hollywood” CANCELLED
• January 22 - Leslie Howsam, Professor, History, University of Windsor, “Discipline and Narrative: British Publishers and Historical Knowledge 1850-1950”
• January 23 - Thomas Abowd, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, “Colonizing Palestine: The Politics of Place and Nation Under Israeli Military Rule”
• January 29 - Ken Jackson, Associate Professor, English, “Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Kierkegaard, and Suspending the Ethical Now”
• January 30 - Josee Jarry, Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Windsor, “Self Esteem and Body Image”
• February 5 - Leon Wilson, Chair, Sociology, “Western Media and Adolescent Development in Guyana”
• February 6 - Kidada E. Williams, Assistant Professor, History, “Some Costs of White Supremacist Violence on the African American Family”
• February 12 - Lisa Alexander, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, “Effa Manley and the Politics of Passing for Black or White”
• February 13 - Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan, Director, Foreign Language Technology Center, “Integrating On-line Learning in Foreign Language Instruction”
• February 19 - Lisa Ze Winters, Assistant Professor, English and Africana Studies, “The Traipsing Mulatta and Economies of Blackness”
• February 20 - Perry Mars, Professor, Africana Studies, “Ethnic Differentiation, Conflict and Solidarity in the Black Diaspora”
• February 21 - Osumaka Likaka, Associate Professor, History, “Naming, Colonialism, and Everyday Life in the Congo: 1870-1960”
• February 26 - Susan Vineberg, Associate Professor, Philosophy, “Mathematical Representation in Empirical Science”CANCELLED
• February 27 - Frances N. Brockington, Associate Professor, Music, “Art Song: Uniquely American” Dr. Brockington's talk will be held in Schaver Music Recital Hall (Room 0412 Old Main)
• March 5- Norah Duncan IV, Associate Chair, Music, “The Legacy of Johnny Allen, Jr.: Detroit Jazz Legend ” Rescheduled to April 9th due to the Closure. Dr. Duncan's talk will be held in Schaver Music Recital Hall (Room 0412 Old Main)
• March 18 - Roslyn Abt Schindler, Associate Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “Border Crossing to Zbaszyn: A Holocaust Tale of Two Countries”
• March 19 - Jim Wittebols, Professor, Communication Studies, University of Windsor, “Media and Promotional Culture: Commodifying Authenticity”
• March 25 - Julie Klein, Professor, English & Nardina Mein, Director, Library, Computing and Media Services, “WSU-HASTAC Library Digital Media Project”
• March 26 - Clifford Clark, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Economics, “Ideology and Economic Development”
• April 1 - Caroline Maun, Assistant Professor, English, “Nature Does Not Love Us: The Novels and Poetry of Evelyn Scott”
• April 2 - Roy Amore, Professor, Political Science and Associate Dean, Arts and Social Sciences, University of Windsor, “Four Models of the Religion and Politics Interface: China, Iran, Turkey, the USA”CANCELLED
• April 8 - Michael Liebler, Senior Lecturer, English, “Poems of Russia, Israel and Germany”
• April 9 - Norah Duncan IV, Associate Chair, Music, “The Legacy of Johnny Allen, Jr.: Detroit Jazz Legend ” Dr. Duncan's talk will be held in Schaver Music Recital Hall (Room 0412 Old Main)
• April 15 - Christopher H. Johnson, Professor Emeritus, History, “Kinship and Modernity: New Perspectives on a Neglected Issue”
• April 16 - Katherine Quinsey, Associate Professor, English, University of Windsor, “Antichrist of wit: Religious and Cultural Authority in Pope’s Dunciad”
• April 22 - Lisabeth Hock, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “TBA”
• April 23 - Christopher Leland, Professor, English, “Narrative by Other Means”
• April 29 - Andre Furtado, Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, “Teaching Mathematics to the Scared”
• April 30 - George Patrick Parris, Coordinator and Assistant Professor, Education, “The Impact of Trauma on Disability Adjustment and Coping”
• May 6 - Fran Shor, Professor, History, “Constructing and Contesting the American Century”

TALK ABSTRACTS:

Robert Burgoyne, Professor, English
“World Trade Center and United 93 - Traumatic Historical Film?”
Simultaneously disruptive and conservative, the narratives of United 93 and World Trade Center occupy an odd netherworld of historical representation -- challenging in terms of subject matter, but narrowly circumscribed in their approach. Shaped by the cultural barriers that have been erected around the memory of 9/11, both films are scrupulous in their pursuit of authenticity, and yet focus on such a narrow slice of history that they seem to deflect historical understanding as well as any larger sense of “coming to terms.” While not rising to the level of prohibition that surrounded Holocaust representation before Schindler’s List, the idea that it is still “too soon” to represent 9/11 has permeated much of U.S. culture, a perception that apparently influenced the filmmakers to rigorously delimit their works. As the critic and essayist Frank Rich has commented, however, perhaps it is already “too late;” the event has begun to fade from memory, the culturally therapeutic value of representing the event may no longer hold.*
* Frank Rich, “Too Soon? It’s Too Late for ‘United 93’” New York Times, (May 7, 2006).

Sharon F. Lean, Assistant Professor, Political Science
“Protest and the Public Sphere in Mexico”
In Mexico, political liberalization has created the opportunity for new types of political expression that 70 years of single-party rule did not accommodate. The various political forces of the nation are presently working to define a tradition of protected public debate. The present research investigates contemporary public sphere debate around issues including electoral accountability, national economic policy, the rights of indigenous minorities and the role of independent media sources. How do citizens occupy the public sphere in a democratic Mexico?

From June 2006 to the present, the state of Oaxaca has been embroiled in protests demanding the resignation of the governor after his violent crackdown against teachers protesting for higher wages. The state of Oaxaca is now militarized, virtually under siege. After the July 2006 presidential election, over one million supporters of the PRD, whose candidate lost the race by a razor-thin margin, took to the streets alleging fraud. Tens of thousands shut down the most prominent boulevard in Mexico City for 45 days, demanding a full recount. In January 2007, 70,000 citizens marched to demand government control of the spiralling cost of tortillas, and gained a temporary price cap. In the southern state of Chiapas, citizens continue a decades-long experiment in automonous participatory democracy.

Our research, still at an early stage, finds that citizen action in the public sphere in some cases makes important contributions to the nation’s political discourse. In other cases, political participation in the public sphere is perceived to impede political progress by reinforcing non-democratic patterns of the past.

Dr. Lean will be accompanied in this presentation by five students who conducted research in Mexico in August 2007 with the support of a WSU Global Grant. During the colloquium, they will each speak briefly about their findings.

Susan Frekko, Lecturer, Anthropology
“Ideologies of Language in Catalonia”
The re-institutionalization of Catalan following the passage of the 1979 Catalan Statute of Autonomy has put the language on display in the public sphere. Because Catalan acts as a sign of a Catalan nation, representations of Catalan are fraught, and linguistic regimentation is prevalent. This project examines sites for the display and regimentation of Catalan (such as television broadcasting and language planning). My work reveals, on the one hand, an increasing definition of Catalan as a public language and, on the other hand, the notion that the language has not attained full public status. According to this language ideology, Catalan is a monologic language that operates exclusively as a codified, normative standard and not as a language composed of multiple registers capable of indexing all social positions. Catalan’s purported lack of registers is part of a language ideology that compares Catalan unfavorably to hegemonic national languages. According to this view, Catalan is not “normal” because it has failed to become the taken-for-granted language associated with a discrete political territory.

Max Nelson, Assistant Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Windsor
“300 and the Ancient and Modern Idealization of the Spartans”
The film 300, which follows the exploits of King Leonidas and his men at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., exalts the Spartans as warriors who unstintingly adhere to the tenets of honor, duty, and glory, and who refuse to retreat under any circumstances. I propose to examine the historicity of this portrayal and to suggest that it forms part of a long, and often misguided tradition of idealizing ancient Sparta.

Ljiljana Progovac, Professor, English
“Sex and Syntax: Explaining Human Grammars through Evolutionary Forces”
Highlighting the challenge for an evolutionary approach to syntax/grammar, and ridiculing some attempts at it, one of Chomsky’s followers, Lightfoot, says regarding one abstract syntactic principle: “Subjacency has many virtues, but … it could not have increased the chances of having fruitful sex.” Nonetheless, in my project I argue that there are certain marginal constructions in modern-day languages that are best analyzed as evolutionary ‘fossils’ of a simpler stage of syntax. In English, these include mini sentences (e.g. Problem solved; Family first!; Him worry?!) and certain ‘exocentric’ compounds (e.g. pick-pocket, turn-coat, Mar-wood, dare-devil). Exocentric compounds, which across languages evoke striking images, often derogatory and vulgar, can give a glimpse into the very beginnings of syntax, as well as into how sexual selection might have helped shape syntax. Seen in this completely novel light, both sentence formation (subsuming principles such as Subjacency) and compound formation benefit from being subjected to evolutionary explanations.

Kathryne Lindberg, Professor, English, & Thomas Featherstone, Archivist III, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs
“Shot in Silence: Labor Photography and Commentary in Black and Red, 1932-34”
A paper and presentation on the photo albums (some of which carry commentary) of Walter and Victor Reuther. These books, one of which was a project for a course at Wayne, were made at virtually the same time as the Ford Hunger March and initial union and unemployed organizing efforts in Detroit; while silent about these events, these amateur photographers and future labor professionals shot films of Detroit's Black Bottom and the Gorky Ford Motor Plant in USSR that cry out to be brought into interdisciplinary discussions that can take them diacritically outside the normative interrogations of labor history and aesthetics. Official labor history, including that of the UAW, has been virtually silent about the Soviet and domestic, youthful political affiliations and artistic adventures of these labor leaders; not for this reason alone, the interest that this research can now excite cannot be over-estimated. Part of what is new and different is that the work of these young activists, barely in their 20s in the 30s, is that 'the work of art [and activism] in the age of digital reproduction' allows one to see so much more of the eyes and "I's" behind the camera than ever before.

Karen Tonso, Associate Professor, Education & Jorge Prosperi, Detroit Country Day, “Poetics from the Heart”
A study of parental involvement in schooling (among recent Mexican immigrants who spoke only Spanish and whose children attended predominantly Black urban public schools) raised important questions about preserving the full range of parents’ verbal expression in research findings. We continuously asked ourselves: How can we better represent the voices of research participants? Customary ways of reporting findings seemed lifeless and cold compared to the animated, emotional conversations occurring during interviews. We argue that poetics, which share some of the qualities of poems, have potential to fill this gap.

Poetry holds a special place among literary forms. As Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote: “Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole… Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination….’” As we use the term, poetics meld reason and imagination. They are products of qualitative data analysis, so on the one hand relate to what we know (are related to reason). But, on the other hand, poetics tap the recollections and mental images through which research participants made sense of their world, so relate to the imagination. Join us, then, for a brief overview about constructing poetics, followed by poetics from the heart – a “poetry” reading in Spanish and English – as we present selected findings from this research study.

Ken Walters, Associate Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“Bearding Brutus: Paradigmatic Pressure and the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic”
By studying elements of stagecraft (i.e., entrances, exits, gestures, etc.) in the 1st century Roman dramas of Seneca much can be learned which can aid in the interpretation of these plays. For example, Seneca appears to follow the rule of three actors which he seems to have inherited from Greek tragedy; except for two places, the plays can be performed with no more than three speaking actors on-stage at any given time, provided that those actors can exit, change masks, and return as different characters. One notices that the roles are distributed among the available actors in significant ways: in several plays, all of the male roles belong to the same actor. Often relatives (father and son, cousins, husband and wife) are given to the same actor, as are murderers and victims. And in one play, the Hercules Furens, the three roles played by one actor, while very different characters, all perform the same functions of observer and persecutor of the protagonist.

Charles Stivale, Distinguished Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“Boyz 2 Men: The Collaborative Erotics of the Brothers Goncourt”
In 1851, the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt began to record their impressions of contemporary life, art and mores in Paris, collected eventually as the Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire. Their inspiration for undertaking this journal was the aphoristic writings of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moralistes, and to these learned models of French high culture, the brothers Goncourt added elements of an equally lofty artistic sensibility nourished by their evolving activities as collectors and connoisseurs of the plastic arts. However, in contrast to the cultural heights to which they aspired, they also cultivated what would become a hyper-realist, even naturalist, commitment to a literary practice based on the stark depiction of truth. They translated this commitment into the unbridled examination and critique of their contemporaries, starting from their observation of the Parisian demi-monde, through the literary and intellectual milieu, to the heights of Second Empire society. This contrast between heights and depths reveals at once the difficulties they encountered as aspiring hommes de lettres in the Parisian literary battleground and the fascination they exhibited with myriad contemporary erotic practices, their own as well as those they observed. In the brown-bag lecture, I propose to outline at once the obstacles that the brothers faced in moving, despite themselves, toward an iconoclastic and paradoxical membership in the empire of letters under Napoléon III and their collaborative approach to this ascent precisely through a persistent, indeed obsessive examination of the erotics of their contemporary culture.

Jeff Rebudal, Assistant Professor, Dance
“Reinventing Opera: The Role of Dance and Choreography in Contemporary Opera Productions”
For nearly 300 years, opera has been considered to be the highest of all performing art forms with its emphasis on combining all the arts in grand spectacle. Until recently has dance and choreography become more critical to opera, particularly in contemporary productions during the late 20th century into the early millennium including Emmanuel Chabrier’s opera buffe L’Etoile, among others.

Critically analyzing the collaborative and artistic processes within the genre of contemporary choreography for opera productions reveal reinterpretations of the classic opera in form, structure, design and performance.

Artistic directors of opera companies together with stage directors across the nation and abroad are seeking the expertise of contemporary modern choreographers to be part of the main creative ensemble. During the last three decades, choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Child, Seán Curran, Mark Dendy, Bill T. Jones, and Doug Varone, and Mark Morris have become collaborators in major opera productions and have significantly contributed to the innovative visual aesthetics within contemporary opera.

Movement and dance for opera have become more complex for the opera performer as the role of choreography and the significance of the choreographer have become increasingly central to the shifting visual landscape of opera productions.

Thomas Kohn, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“The Stagecraft of Seneca”
By studying elements of stagecraft (i.e., entrances, exits, gestures, etc.) in the 1st century Roman dramas of Seneca much can be learned which can aid in the interpretation of these plays. For example, Seneca appears to follow the rule of three actors which he seems to have inherited from Greek tragedy; except for two places, the plays can be performed with no more than three speaking actors on-stage at any given time, provided that those actors can exit, change masks, and return as different characters. One notices that the roles are distributed among the available actors in significant ways: in several plays, all of the male roles belong to the same actor. Often relatives (father and son, cousins, husband and wife) are given to the same actor, as are murderers and victims. And in one play, the Hercules Furens, the three roles played by one actor, while very different characters, all perform the same functions of observer and persecutor of the protagonist.

Arifa Javed, Lecturer, Sociology
“Parenting and Parallel Socialization among Immigrant Children”
Raising children in a multicultural society and parenting them in an alien culture without a reference group can be a daunting challenge. The generation gap becomes more evident for immigrant families than for their non-immigrant counterparts. Parents desire to be role models for their children but there are limits to their ability to play this role: There are certain factors in American society which both immigrant parents and children are exposed to at the same time, often resulting in children quickly outsmarting their parents.

The children’s world, however, is split between home and school because of two different sets of norms, expectations and role models thus leading to parallel socialization.

Popular culture is at times another important challenge, more often for its negative influences than positive. The picking and choosing these families go through in terms of cultural dualities and the lack of suitable role models is very confusing. A loud and clear mediation is required by the parents to help their children process popular culture in compatibility with their own culture. In such situations, parents play the multiple roles of the extended family in balancing out the challenges of parallel socialization and acculturation. While they have to substitute for the missing extended family, they also need to work with teachers at school as copartners in a joint mentoring process for their kids. These two components add to parenting and make it a challenging ordeal.

Mary Garrett, Associate Professor, Communication, & Haiyong Liu, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“Translations before the Translation”
In contemporary literary criticism the notion of multiple readings is quite familiar. However, translation studies has not yet fully taken account of this concept. Instead, translators--as well as theorists of translation--generally assume a one-to-one relationship to the text, in which it is the translator’s interaction with the text that determines its meaning, with little to no attention given to the original readers’ interpretations. In this presentation we will discuss the misapprehensions that may arise when a work that is read in multiple ways is translated without acknowledging this variety of interpretations. Our case study will be The Wolf Totem [Lang tuteng], a work that was a best-seller in China and whose publication in English has been timed to coincide with the Olympics in Beijing.

Brad Roth, Associate Professor, Political Science and Law
“Coming to Terms with Ruthlessness: Sovereign Equality and the Limits of International Criminal Justice”
International efforts to secure the bases of human well-being routinely require the cooperation of political leaders to whom significant human rights violations can be attributed. Working relationships in the international arena largely depend on maintaining an “agreement to disagree,” not only about conflicts of interest, but also about matters of fundamental justice.

International law needs to maintain a balance between ideological pluralism and insistence on the inadmissibility of practices reprehended by an overlapping consensus of disparate belief systems. International penal processes, such as those established by the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the new International Criminal Court, are generally appropriate to the latter function.

However, when domestic courts seek to vindicate universal principles unilaterally by asserting extraterritorial penal jurisdiction over acts of foreign states in the name of international law, the result may be to jeopardize the international legal order’s indispensable function of facilitating accommodation. Legal doctrines limiting extraterritorial prosecution – such as jurisdictional limitations, personal and functional immunities of foreign state officials, and strict interpretations of the principle of nullum crimen sine lege – though obstructive of the pursuit of substantive justice, constitute important safeguards against threats to the normative platform that undergirds peaceful and respectful international relations.

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Terese Volk, Associate Professor, Music
“The Works Progress Administration Manuscript Collection in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Music Library”
During President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, attempts to ease the vast unemployment of the Depression resulted in several unique and historically significant music projects. From 1935 -1943, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided employment for hundreds of musicians under the Federal Music Project, a section of Federal Project One. Along with establishing orchestras and bands across the nation, the Federal Music Project also gave employment to music copyists. The Music Copying Project provided conductors with scores and instrumental parts for the performing groups. The music was all copied by hand and signed by the copyist. Since most copyists were not musicians but professional draftspersons who were trained to copy music, each page was carefully checked for errors before it was declared satisfactory work.

In 1939 the federal government gave control of the WPA operations to the states. At that time, the Federal Music Project became a state-run Music Project. Nearly every state had a WPA Music-Copying Project that continued until 1943 when the federal government dismantled the WPA completely. Representative of the state Music Copying Projects, the Michigan Music Copying Project provided scores and parts for the Michigan WPA orchestras. The music was held in a central WPA music library in Lansing, MI. When the WPA orchestras and library were disbanded in 1943, the music was sent to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), the oldest and largest continuing orchestra in the state. The DSO performed selections from this Collection regularly over the next 40 years. At some point during the 1980s, the collection was boxed and stored in a basement room under the main stage of Orchestra Hall, the performing home of the DSO, and not discovered there until 2005.

This music was intended for performance. The value of this collection is the fact that most of the music is still in playable condition, but needs conservation to keep it that way. This presentation will focus on the history of this collection, with a description of the catalog, and the proposal for conserving it for future performance, and making it accessible to researchers and the general public.

Heather Dillaway, Assistant Professor, Sociology
“What is ‘Successful Aging’ in Michigan Communities?”
Successful aging literature suggests that older adults have agency and autonomy over disease and disability. To remaining free from disability and disease, older adults maintain a high level of physical and cognitive functioning, continue interpersonal relationships, and contribute productively to society. Much of this literature on successful aging has been quantitative and somewhat prescriptive, defining “aging” as well as “success” in aging very narrowly; thus, this presentation serves to critique this literature by reporting on a 2006 survey of Michigan residents about their “success” in aging. Specifically, survey data is presented to show whether and how diverse individuals define themselves as successful agers. In her conclusions, the author calls for a broader conceptualization of what it means to age “successfully” and additional sociological research in this area, to promote a greater understanding of how diverse populations conceptualize and engage in aging processes.

Elizabeth Faue, Professor, History
“The Shaping Up Years: Labor Reporting, Working-Class Culture Politics, and Labor Movement Survival after World War I”
This paper concerns the revival of labor journalism in the years after World War I and the working-class and left intellectuals who kept the knowledge of labor organizing alive in the decade between 1919 and 1929. By 1922, wartime measures in the United States had devastated the vibrant radical journalism of the pre-war era. Thousands of dailies, weeklies, and monthlies closed under postal censorship and wartime inflation; reporters and editors came under the scrutiny of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and foreign-language publications faced political reaction during and after World War I. What was required, as labor organizers and radical activists realized during the postwar strike wave, was labor journalism that could fly under political radar and at the same time provide an alternative and credible source of information and education for workers and the public at large. The Federated Press, a labor news service, seemed to answer the bill, as it created a new network of labor, farm, and radical publications that gathered and disseminated the news of political and labor organization and provided critical analysis of the issues of the day. What was perhaps more important was that the Federated Press also constituted a network of individuals who created new forms of social knowledge, gathered information from workers across the country and abroad, and educated workers and policy-makers about the condition, political allegiance, and character of the working class.

Jose A. Rico-Ferrer, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“The Spanish Galateo: When Jokes and Laughter Become a Serious Matter”
The publication in 1593 of Lucas Gracián Dantisco’s El Galateo español, a free adaptation of Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo, would be an innovative force on Spanish conceptions of ‘decorum’ and propriety. While Dantisco’s is only the second translation into Spanish of the Italian treatise, it was widely read, and influential to writers such as Cervantes or Gracián.
El Galateo español is important because of its focus on the concrete aspects of courtesy, which signals a shift toward a practical tone in the discourses on social discipline. This presentation will examine the role structurally played by jokes and laughter, as introduced by the avowedly male narratorial voice, in this change. As part of its more practical approach to manners and courtesy, Galateo develops a narrative in which jokes and ‘burlas’ (pranks) become a pedagogical tool for its intended male reader: as a cautionary tale, examples of exchanges gone awry readily illustrate the dangers of inadequate conduct in the form of social embarrassment or social shame. Simultaneously, in its focus on the process of courtesy, Dantisco’s work displays an urbane rather than a courtly humor. Finally, it also attests to the increasing interest in jokes and ‘burlas,’ both as social ornamenta and as potential pitfalls of the successful social exchange.

Lavinia Hart, Assistant Professor, Theatre & Christopher Collins, Associate Professor, Music
“‘Translations’ by Brian Friel: Directing an Interdepartmental and Community Collaboration to Expand the Theme of Translation on Multiple Levels”
“A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.” John Millington Singe, The Aran Islands (1907)

Brian Friel sets his play in 1833 inside an Irish Hedge School in County Donegal. The new English Language National Schools are replacing the Gaelic language local schools. With this as a backdrop, the inciting incident in the play comes with the arrival of the British Army to carry out the first Ordnance Survey in which all Irish name places will be changed to English name places.

Last semester Chris Collins (Music) and Steven Stone (Dance) worked with Lavinia Hart (Theatre) on scoring original music and dance/movement to the text of Brian Friel’s play Translations. The collaboration included the component of sign language interpretation by Dan McDougall and Shelly Tocco, founding members of Terp-Theatre Detroit. The purpose of the exploration was to examine the levels of translation required to realize the phenomenon of genuine communication between two cultures locked in conflict. The major dramatic question of the play asks “Can a new way of speaking, not related to dominance and subjugation, exist between the divide, however briefly?”

Chris Collins’ compositions captured both Irish and British traditional musical styles to reflect the prominent cultures; Steven Stone staged key moments of dance/movement to impart pictorial information to the non-hearing audience; and the signers represented differences in language through Signed Exact English for British characters and American Sign Language for Irish speaking characters. Lavinia Hart directed the project.

The Brown Bag presentation will include a live demonstration of an underscored, signed portion of the text; and discussion of the process in the hope that interest may arise for future interdepartmental collaborations.

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Avis Vidal, Professor, Geography and Urban Planning
“Contemporary Approaches to Neighborhood Revitalization”
Urban America has long been plagued by the presence of neighborhoods that house high concentrations of poor people and provide them with living conditions substantially inferior to the social norms of the day.

Referred to over the years as slums, ghettos, blighted neighborhoods, or simply "the wrong side of the tracks," such neighborhoods have commonly received the most active attention when they have been perceived as a drag on local economic development and prosperity. While systematic local efforts to improve conditions in poor neighborhoods date back at least to the early 20^th century, major initiatives with a national profile post-date World War II. In this seminar, a brief review of the well-known large federal programs (such as the War on Poverty and the Empowerment Zone programs) will set the stage for an examination of the more numerous and lower profile attempts by local governments and nonprofit organizations to improve physical and economic conditions in poor and at-risk neighborhoods. The discussion will focus both on promising strategies (e.g., targeted infrastructure investments, housing construction and rehabilitation, comprehensive neighborhood planning, and greater community voice in local decision-making in matters of neighborhood concern) and key challenges to implementing them successfully.

Mame Jackson, Professor, Art and Art History, “The Artist as Citizen -- Tyree Guyton and His Heidelberg Project”

Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
“Intimacies: Sleep, Families, and Disease”
Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in both the diagnosis of and available treatments for sleep disorders. The makers of sleep aids (Ambien, Lunesta, Rozerem) have all annually posted hundreds of millions of dollars in profit over the past five years, due in large part to this new medical interest in sleep and generated in large part by these new drugs. When patients seek medical treatment for sleep disorders, what they are often seeking is a return to “normal” life, a return to daily work schedules and the easing of social tensions stemming from their disrupted sleep. But in order to achieve this return to normalcy, they must accept a pharmaceutical fix for their sleep disorder.

In this paper, I trace the idea of intimacy as it operates in the contemporary practice of sleep medicine in the United States. I juxtapose the sleep disorders of obstructive sleep apnea and REM behavior disorder, their treatments, and the cultural understandings of patients, clinicians and researchers in an effort to rethink what it means to be intimate in the contemporary pharmaceutical age, along with who and what we can be intimate with, what the foundations of this new intimacy are, and what these intimacies can generate.

Elena Past, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“The Dying Diva: Violent Ends for Clara Calamai in Visconti’s Ossessione and Argento’s Profondo rosso”
At the conclusion of Luchino Visconti’s film Ossessione (1943), the female protagonist, Giovanna, is killed in a violent auto accident while fleeing the police with her lover. At the end of Dario Argento’s psychological thriller Profondo rosso (1975), piano-playing detective Marc Daly (played by David Hemmings) manages to save himself by killing a hatchet-wielding attacker who has slashed her way through much of the rest of the cast. The fatal neck wounds that end Ossessione and Profondo rosso are inflicted in both instances on actress Clara Calamai, whose violent death concludes two films made more than thirty years apart. In each narrative, the beautiful diva plays the part of both assassin and victim.

These analogies create physical and historical links between Visconti’s and Argento’s films, links that inspire a series of questions about the role of this donna delinquente and about the relationship between the two films. What messages, written on Calamai’s body and scrawled in her blood, might we read in the final, hauntingly similar images? In the transition from film to film, the diva’s dying frame becomes a physical palimpsest that reveals, under the layers of her flesh, traces of what came before, an organic monument to the passage of time. Evident in these two different cinematic moments are divergent epistemologies of crime, socio-political attitudes that speak both to the periods in which the films were produced and to the relationship between two moments in Italian cinema.

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Suzanne Hilgendorf, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, “International Media and the English Language: The Linguistic Impact of Hollywood in Germany”
In today’s era of globalization, the media play a prominent role in the international spread of English. Among the most influential media forces is the Hollywood film industry, which has dominated world cinema since the early 20th century. One country where this powerful presence has been felt is Germany, where in 2003 U.S. films generated a remarkable 76.8% of total screen revenues.

Taking the example of Germany, this paper considers the linguistic impact occurring as a result of the dominant presence of U.S. films. While voice-over synchronization remains standard treatment for U.S. productions, English nevertheless has a conspicuous presence within the domain as it is used extensively in the titling of films for German release. An analysis of film titles from 1986 to 2005 (ca. 400 films) reveals a continuum of language use between the two poles of English and German, with films commonly being released with their original English title or a code-mixed variation. Attesting to the status of English within the domain is the fact this practice has spread to German productions as well, as is reflected in the examples of the successful films Go, Trabi, Go! (1991) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003).

Lothar Spang, Librarian IV, University Libraries & Deborah Tucker, Librarian II, University Libraries
“Chapbooks: Institutional Repository Inspires Urban K-12 Student Poets”
The focus of this program is to promote artistic appreciation of the written word in order to provide assistance in developing information literate youth and their family support systems for the 21th Century. Students of Murray-Wright High School in Detroit and Brace-Lederle K-8 School of Southfield have been the primary focus for this project collaborative. Other schools have agreed to participate in the 2008 school year. Student participants are introduced to digital technology, and with the help of their teachers and WSU librarians their original poetry and art now resides on the WSU Libraries Digital Commons, the web based Wayne State University Institutional Repository. This is one of the Libraries Community Arts Outreach Program Collaborative.

Myra Tawfik, Professor, Law, University of Windsor
“A Connecticut Yankee in Montreal: Mark Twain’s Adventures with Canadian Copyright Law”
In 1881, American humourist and author Mark Twain paid his first visit to Canada. Arriving in Montreal during a snowstorm, it wasn’t for his own edification that he undertook this journey. Rather, Twain’s visit was necessitated by his desire to secure a Canadian copyright over his latest book, The Prince and the Pauper and to free himself, once and for all, of the scourge of Canadian ‘buccaneers and pirates’ who were publishing his works in Canada without his permission. This paper will explore the legal context underlying copyright in Canada in the middle to late 19th century and the particular set of circumstances that led Twain to make that fateful journey. It will highlight the roles that both Britain and the US played in shaping 19th century Canadian copyright law – a body of law that so exasperated Twain that he noted: “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”

John Corvino, Associate Professor, Philosophy
“The Best Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage (and why it doesn’t work)”
Is it possible to construct a compelling argument against same-sex marriage without appealing either to religious conviction or to the claim that such unions are inherently morally wrong? In his recent book The Future of Marriage, David Blankenhorn attempts to do just that, arguing that to endorse same-sex marriage is to move society further away from the idea that children need mothers and fathers, a movement which in turn would harm all children (and not just the children of same-sex couples). It's an intriguing argument worthy of serious consideration. In this talk I explore and evaluate Blankenhorn's argument.

Anca Vlasopolos, Professor, English
“The New Bedford Samurai: Reading, Discussion, and Book Signing"
This talk will trace the genesis of my nonfiction novel, The New Bedford Samurai, in terms of its historical sources and the present-day environmental problems originating in great part in nineteenth-century globalization. The Industrial Revolution, the trade in whale oil and exotic feathers, the forced opening of Japan by Admiral Perry and his black ships all feature in my novel, as does life in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Japan and New England. I will be reading a brief section of the novel and showing slides of historical sites in Japan and the U.S., of the short-tailed albatross hunted to near-extinction, and of the environmental heroes of the story. Copies of the book will be available for signing.

Ross J. Pudaloff, Associate Professor, English
“We have to live upon what we can catch’: Mordecai Noah and She Would Be a Soldier”
Authors in the early republic relied heavily on forms, genres, diction, tropes, conceptions of beauty, etc. found in 18th century British writers such as Addison, Pope, et al. These writings have traditionally been condemned as derivative, an aesthetic of the merely ornamental, explained if not excused insofar as they express a necessary provincial backwardness. These texts and authors have been dismissed in an American literary criticism shaped by nationalism and exceptionalism; those that have continued to matter, Irving and Cooper, for example, have gained inclusion insofar as their work could be fitted into the national narrative with perhaps an embarrassed silence about those elements that make too much room for the aesthetic and especially the ornamental.

The negative judgment of literary work marked by borrowings, derivativeness and dependence is, however, not all the case there is. The writers of the early republic might have responded, in Mordecai Noah’s phrase, that they “have to live upon what we catch.” If we put aside nationalist and exceptionalist assumptions, the ornamental can be seen to be both as a legitimate aesthetic and a vehicle to do cultural work in the new republic.
In this paper I trace the aesthetic of the ornamental in Mordecai Noah’s She Would Be a Soldier (1819) to argue that, at least according to the play, the ornamental and the affective relation to it move individuals and society. This apologia for the ornamental in Noah (and others) is part of a larger rereading of texts from the early republic, those which have been unworthy of critical approbation because they are derivative and thus inauthentic. I hope to expand our sense of what counts as aesthetic, in part by noting that canonical modes of American literature and literary criticism have been, at best, suspicious, of any form of the aesthetic and contemptuous of those that depart from organicism.

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WINTER SEMESTER

Michael Scrivener, Professor and Guggenheim Awardee, English
“Rosa Matilda and ‘Jew’ King: Poetry, Gothic Novels and Gonefs in the Romantic Era”
John or Jonathan King, born Jacob Rey, known in Georgian London as “Jew” King (c. 1753-1823), was an extraordinary but perhaps not unrepresentative figure illustrating the place of Jews in English society. Moneylender, editor of a radical newspaper, political controversialist, apologist for Judaism, King also practiced “unrespectable” radical politics that used blackmail. His financial dealings were complex, sometimes criminal. He knew well, or lent money to, or entertained at his famous dinner parties prominent figures like Mary Robinson, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Richard Sheridan, Charles Fox, and Lord Byron, in addition to various aristocrats with a taste for gambling and prostitutes. Two of his daughters, Sophia and Charlotte, wrote innovative poetry that influenced Byron and Shelley and that has been newly appreciated as romantic women’s writing illustrating Jerome McGann’s concept of the poetics of sensibility. Sophia and Charlotte also wrote numerous novels, mostly Gothic fiction, that was as innovative as their poetry. Long considered just trashy, their fiction, especially Charlotte’s Zofloya (1806), has enjoyed new readings as sexually expressive and philosophically provocative. Long ignored or dismissed, the King family in its own peculiar way reconfigures our understanding of both literary romanticism and Georgian Anglo-Jewry.

Mysoon Rizk, Associate Professor, Art, University of Toledo
“Why Look at “Animals in Pants”? The Posthumanist Case of David Wojnarowicz”

Robert Nelson, Assistant Professor, History
“A German in the North American Prairies: Max Sering and the Concept of Inner Colonization”
Max Sering is the most direct biographical link between the western colonial frontier of North America, and the eastern colonial frontier of Prussian Poland. He personally envisioned Germany’s future in the East while studying ‘inner colonization’ in Canada and America in the Summer of 1883, and was then key in convincing Bismarck and others to transform Germany’s colonial mission from one of overseas expansion to that of the ‘much more important’ inner colonization of Germany’s eastern frontier. As the godfather of inner colonization, Sering was then lionized during the Weimar years, for having been ‘right’. Indeed, his concepts travel directly into the pages of Mein Kampf, then being dictated at the height of Sering’s fame in 1924, ‘It cannot be emphasized sharply enough that any German internal colonization must serve to eliminate social abuses particularly to withdraw the soil from widespread speculation, but can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without the acquisition of new soil’. Indeed, Hitler rejected overseas colonialism for many of the same reasons as did Sering, yet faulted the goals of internal colonization for their ultimate timidity.

In 1883, the German agrarian economist Max Sering was dispatched to North America to discover why it was that farmers from Germany’s East were emigrating in droves to essentially the same type of land on the far side of the Atlantic. What he discovered there was a government-sponsored program to pay for and settle small farmers. It was a ‘colonial’ program within the mother country’s borders, and it excited him immensely. He returned to Berlin and made a passionate attempt to convince Bismarck that an ‘inner’ colonial empire in the East, where German farmers would send ‘wagons’ east’, settle and displace the local natives (Prussian Poles), was Germany’s future. In this same period, 1883-85, Bismarck largely ended the overseas expansion of the German empire and set up the Prussian Settlement Commission. Over the next thirty years, while German settlers moved east, a large literature grew up around the idea of ‘inner colonization’, centering upon the ideas put forward by the Society for Inner Colonization, an intellectual and political body headed by Sering and Alfred Hugenberg. When German armies captured huge swaths of land to the East in 1915, these very same thinkers were called upon to greatly expand their colonial dreams, now to include the Baltics and Belarus.

Cynthia Erb, Associate Professor, English
"Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields: Functions of the Child Star in New Hollywood”

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Leslie Howsam, Professor, History, University of Windsor
“Discipline and Narrative: British Publishers and Historical Knowledge 1850-1950”
The history of the book in Britain includes history books as well as the more famous fictional works that sat beside them on shelves and parlor tables. Mid-Victorian historians (people like Macaulay and Froude) wrote strong narratives that were as attractive as novels to commercial publishers. But their successors in the 1880s and 1890s (J. R. Seeley, Mandell Creighton and others) wanted to “break the drowsy spell of narrative” and make history a science. The textual and material object we know as ‘the book’ became a testing ground for academic professionalization, and publishers developed new formats, such as periodicals, multi-volume series and collaborative histories, for the dissemination of serious historical scholarship. Meanwhile, they still courted Charlotte Yonge and other authors of “delightful” history books for children and for the common reader.

Thomas Abowd, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
“Colonizing Palestine: The Politics of Place and Nation Under Israeli Military Rule”
The Palestinian-Israeli national conflict, the subject of intense international interest, has been generally misunderstood as a “religious conflict” or an “eternal,” age-old struggle between cultures and peoples naturally irreconcilably at odds. This talk not only examines the ahistorical quality of such claims, but also makes the case for looking at Israeli rule over the Palestinians as colonial rule. I detail the ways in which this national conflict is largely one over housing and land and explores the ways in which Israeli colonial power has functioned spatially in Jerusalem. I examine how Israeli military forces and other institutions have appropriated particular Palestinian homes in this divided urban center and remade them in an effort to project specific nationalist meanings, privilege particular memories of the city, and assert claims of exclusive ownership and rights to a Jerusalem central to the national cosmologies of Palestinians, no less than Israelis.

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Ken Jackson, Associate Professor, English
“Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Kierkegaard, and Suspending the Ethical Now”
My argument here is straightforward, linear even. The Winter’s Tale is a powerfully religious play about Paul’s understanding of grace and messianic time. This might not sound like a terribly provocative argument for a play that features a character named “Paulina” and one named “Time” and a unique (for Shakespeare) resurrection, but when it comes to matters of religion Shakespearean scholarship has a remarkable and willful capacity to ignore the obvious. More precisely, the play provides a dramatic glimpse of Paul’s conception of the way time contracts or begins to come to end following the messianic moment of “grace” (charis) but before the end of time (eschaton). In order to make this claim I rely on a great deal of late twentieth-century scholarship on Paul but I give particular attention to Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains. I also pay special attention to Paul’s suggestion that married men, in particular, have a difficult time grasping “the time of the now” (ho nyn kairos).

Josee Jarry, Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Windsor
“Self Esteem and Body Image”
This study examined the effect of a self-esteem threat combined with exposure to thin images on body image (BI) satisfaction and investment. Female participants (N = 94) received a self-esteem threat consisting of false failure feedback or received false success feedback on an intellectual task allegedly highly predictive of academic and professional success. They then viewed media images featuring thin models or products. After viewing thin models, women who had received failure feedback declared themselves more satisfied about their appearance and less invested in it than did women who had received success feedback. These results suggest that exposure to the thin ideal may inspire women experiencing self-esteem threats to use appearance as an alternative source of worth, thus maintaining their global esteem through BI compensatory self-enhancement. Potential long term implications of this strategy, such as a paradoxical increase in BI investment and the development of eating pathology, are discussed.

Leon Wilson, Chair, Sociology
“Western Media and Adolescent Development in Guyana”
This study evaluates the relationship of western television consumption and exposure to the cultural values and preferences of adolescents in Guyana. Specifically, it compares preferences for indigenous cultural influences in the light of the diffusion of Western entertainment media, beginning with the availability of home television in the early 80’s, and the proliferation of other media forms in the 90’s. The paper also assesses adolescents’ choices of various forms of entertainment, arts, music, literature, food, folk heroes, sports and sport heroes, and demonstrates the positive relationship between such preferences and the consumption of Western television media. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the imbalance between Western and Caribbean cultural knowledge, and links this to Western media exposure. The implications of the findings for the study of globalization are discussed.

Kidada E. Williams, Assistant Professor, History
“Some Costs of White Supremacist Violence on the African American Family”

Lisa Alexander, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies
“Effa Manley and the Politics of Passing for Black or White”
In 2006 Effa Manley became the first woman inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame. Manley's work with the Newark Eagles is well-documented including the signing of Hall of Famers Larry Doby and Monte Irvin, among others, as well as her fight to receive compensation from Major League owners for signing Negro League players. Her civil rights activism is also extraordinary and well-known: she was a member of the NAACP, held anti-lynching days at the ballpark, and led boycotts of business that would not hire blacks.

The one aspect of Manley's life that is less explicit is her racial background. It seems that Manley successfully straddled the color line by claiming different racial identities based on the situation and who was asking the questions. This presentation would examine the issue of passing within professional baseball using Manley as an example. I will discuss the differing implications of Manley passing for white or passing for black and in addition, I will also place Manley's racial identities within the greater context of passing within baseball specifically and American culture more broadly.

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Suzanne Hilgendorf, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures & Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan, Academic Services Officer III
“Integrating On-line Learning in Foreign Language Instruction”
In this session presenters highlight their use of online technology in the teaching of foreign language and culture in three different settings: Multimedia course materials were used in creating a virtual repository of authentic material in the teaching of contemporary francophone culture, customized video material matching grammar and syntax phenomena were introduced in a Chinese language class, and rich web resources were used in an Italian intermediate language class. The use of digital material --- video, audio, graphics, and text--- from the “real world”, replaced or enhanced traditional textbooks, and it resulted, among other things, in making the learning experience interactive, richer and more meaningful for the students in each of these cases. The presenters will talk about their objectives for the integration of technology, what it accomplished in each case, and what its impact was on student learning. They noted significant changes in student interest levels, engagement, and attitude. This session will conclude with a theoretically informed reflection on the use of online technology in instruction. After all, students entering the university now are digital natives, but faculty often are not. Presenters will explore questions such as: Why integrate online technology in instruction at all? Does the use of technology improve student grasp of content? Do students learn better with online instruction? What happens in the online learning environment to the roles of teacher and student? Why not just go with chalk-chalkboard-textbook?

Lisa Ze Winters, Assistant Professor, English and Africana Studies
“The Traipsing Mulatta and Economies of Blackness”
In American letters, the mulatta most often conjures an impossibly beautiful, light-skinned, female subject who is haunted by her mysterious past. When the narrative reveals her hidden history to include African ancestry, the otherwise alluring markings of the mulatta’s body become unmistakable signifiers of an abject Black subject. This stock deployment of the mulatta informs contemporary readings of her as a pathological trope with little significance outside a narrowly defined literary and cultural trajectory in the United States. I argue that rather than constituting a marginal, fixed object lingering precariously on the edge the color line, the mulatta instead operates as transatlantic currency for negotiating Blackness, desire and belonging in the African Diaspora. This paper focuses on 18th- and 19th-century visual and written representations of the signares of the Senegalese islands Gorée and Saint-Louis in order to consider how the mulatta’s synchronic iterations across the Atlantic disrupt the coherence of race and belonging in the African Diaspora.

Perry Mars, Professor, Africana Studies
“Ethnic Differentiation, Conflict and Solidarity in the Black Diaspora”

Osumaka Likaka, Associate Professor, History
“Naming, Colonialism, and Everyday Life in the Congo: 1870-1960”
The naming of strangers was a long established naming convention in Central Africa, which Africans creatively adapted to identify individual Europeans and groups of Europeans. Notwithstanding the singularity of events and situations that motivated the naming of Europeans, the practice worked the same way across the village world. Africans first observed minutely Westerners’ physical appearance, behavior, cultural practices, moral qualities and flaws, and the ways in which they carried out their tasks of establishing the social relations of production. They in the meantime took note of situations that Europeans individually and collectively created. From the familiarity of their village community with individual Europeans, Africans gained a comprehensive understanding of colonialism, and its effects on their individual and collective experiences. Africans then weaved and translated their observations into names, which became not only the local identities for individual Europeans or groups of Europeans, but also the semantic and political codes through which they now perceived, interpreted, and understood colonialism. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into mnemonics, which preserved the village’s observations, interpretations, and representations of colonialism as pithy verbal expressions easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations.

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Susan Vineberg, Associate Professor, Philosophy
“Mathematical Representation in Empirical Science"

Frances N. Brockington, Associate Professor, Music
“Art Song: Uniquely American”
This will be a Lecture/Demonstration illustrating the uniqueness of the American Art Song. Illustrations will be made concerning how a nation of immigrants came to have its own voice. Each period of history in the American experience influenced its music. Examples and explanations of these periodic influences will be discussed. Additionally, we will discuss how this nation's music of song is completely infused by the African American influence.

Norah Duncan IV, Associate Chair, Music
“Johnny Allen, Jr., A Detroit Jazz Legend”
Greatness is usually defined by how high one climbs to the top of one's career, but it may also be defined by how high one lifts up others. Detroit Jazz legend, Johnny Allen, Jr. has made a career out of doing that. Although he is the winner of many Platinum and Gold records for his accompanying orchestras for the Motown greats of the 1960s and ˜70s; although he is the recipient of a Grammy for his accompanying orchestration for Isaac Hayes’ Shaft and although he has taught and mentored many local Jazz greats, he is virtually unknown among the general population. Now four score and ten years old, Mr. Allen stands as an example for us all, a quiet leader, the self-effacing legend who helped put Detroit and its “Motown” sound on the map. His story is worth hearing – his childhood influences, his musical formation, his influence on American pop music, and his motivation to give back to his community.

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Roslyn Abt Schindler, Associate Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“Border Crossing to Zbaszyn: A Holocaust Tale of Two Countries”
A reading from (Re)vision of a Life: My Mother's Holocaust Story . . .
About a year before her 1939 departure from Germany, my mother Golda Seidner, her brothers Bernhard and Hermann, and Hermann's wife Eva, and my grandmother Rosa were expelled from Germany to Poland. Although Rosa and Aaron (d. 1935) Seidner had lived in Germany for many years, their children were born in Germany, and they considered themselves fully German without any intention ever to live in Poland, they were all deemed Polish citizens under German law because Rosa and Aaron had been born in Poland.

They were deported to the Polish border town of Zbaszyn, located near the German border town of Neu-Benschen, in late October 1938. Zbaszyn was the site of a work camp for displaced Jews from Germany. The Germans estimate that between 15,000 and 17,000 Jews were forcibly expelled and dumped at the Polish border between October 27 and 31, 1938. While Zbaszyn was not one of the better known camps that would later draw worldwide attention to the evil brutality of the Nazi regime, it was the first and largest one established for the expulsion of Jews from Germany.

My mother called this place "Niemandsland": "They threw us out in the middle of nowhere. No one wanted us." (Re)vision of a Life: My Mother's Holocaust Story brings us to the middle of this nowhere--and the beginning of the end for several members of my mother's family.

Jim Wittebols, Professor, Communication Studies, University of Windsor
“Media and Promotional Culture: Commodifying Authenticity”

Julie Klein, Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies & Nardina Mein, Director, Library, Computing and Media Services
“WSU-HASTAC Library Digital Media Project”

Clifford Clark, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Economics
“Ideology and Economic Development”
The study of development began in earnest with concern for economic conditions of former colonies, and of Western Europe, after WW II. Although the field has had successes and failures, it has drawn the attention of economists and others who believe their work will be useful to citizens of the world’s developing countries. Though dimmed by the current administration’s military-based foreign policy, students of development remain somewhat optimistic. They generally support the Millennium Development Goals endorsed by 189 countries of the United Nations in September 2000, and tend to agree that development is more about societal than about economic change. The goal of development, that is, is to develop responsive political institutions, in a context of expanding economies that provide fairly distributed opportunities and programs that minimize individual deprivations and poverty.
This paper argues that increasing U.S. development programs will achieve two goals—aiding people of developing countries (in particular, those least fortunate) and increasing prospects for world peace and our national security. Is also suggests a mechanism for expanding U.S. development to accomplish these goals, by establishing development as an effective alternative to militaristic options.

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Caroline Maun, Assistant Professor, English
“Nature Does Not Love Us: The Novels and Poetry of Evelyn Scott”

Roy Amore, Professor, Political Science and Associate Dean, Arts and Social Sciences, University of Windsor
“Four Models of the Religion and Politics Interface: China, Iran, Turkey, the USA”

From long before the prophet Natham chastised King David, rulers and religious leaders have been in each other faces. The recent resurgence of conservative religious movements has led to new tensions in the religion-politics interface. This talk will focus on four countries chosen because they provide such different models of the interface.

In China, although most citizens are not very religious, the main critic of the government has been the outlawed Falun Gong movement. The secular government tolerates but carefully controls five recognized religions. In this model the government has all the power.

In Iran, the Islamic Revolution resulted in a system in which religious leaders have veto power over all government decisions. Here, the clerics have the final say.

In Turkey, the people revere Ataturk, but are slowly moving away from his vision of a modern, westernized Islamic state. The military enforces secularism, but finds that increasingly difficult. Turkey is torn between Islamic resurgence and its desire to get into the EU.

In the USA, the official separation of religion and politics has been compromised by the strong conservative Christian influence on the Republican Party.

Michael Liebler, Senior Lecturer, English
“Poems of Russia, Israel and Germany”
Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream is a collection of traveling poems written in Russia, Israel, Germany, and China that take the reader on a contemplative journey through both the geography of these countries and their cultures as well as through the inward mind of the narrator. As Liebler travels the world, he wrestles with themes of self-discovery, spirituality, identity, and change, and renders poems in his signature raw and defiant style. Thoughtful and direct, these poems look toward beauty and contemplation in a bitter world that has become fraught with mistrust and misunderstanding.

Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream is divided into four sections, the first three of which are set in specific locales—Russia, Germany, and Jerusalem. The final section is not limited to a single geographic location but still finds Liebler traveling through different lands and the resultant emotions of dislocation, alienation, and vulnerability that his surroundings provoke. Throughout this collection Liebler's poems touch on issues of political upheaval, exploitation, and corruption and look at the personal and spiritual transformation left in their wake. This ability to give readers a glimpse of a bleak global reality translated by a hopeful eye has earned Liebler's poems comparisons to the richly imagistic and spiritual work of George Trakl.

In all, this collection is characterized by its calm and powerful voice, which has a musical sensibility in its spare and straightforward presentation.

Tamara Bray, Associate Professor, Anthropology
“Inca Material Culture”

Christopher H. Johnson, Professor Emeritus, History
“Kinship and Modernity: New Perspectives on a Neglected Issue”

Katherine Quinsey, Associate Professor, English, University of Windsor
“Antichrist of wit: Religious and Cultural Authority in Poe’s Dunciad”
Alexander Pope is generally identified as an authoritative voice for Western cultural dominance, writing at the cusp of Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism. As an English Catholic writing at that particular historical point, however, Pope consciously writes as one who is both citizen and colonized subject. To some extent marginalized within his own culture, Pope creates himself as its author and authorizer, putting himself at a mythical centre. As heir to both Renaissance humanism and British imperialism, Pope is imaginatively rooted in the translatio imperii and translatio studii, or the transference of global cultural authority from Rome to Britain. As an English recusant, Pope appropriates and revises this master narrative of Western civilization and British cultural dominance, and with it, the discourse of British nationhood, in significant ways. He plays on the multiple significance of Rome as a symbol, creating ironic resonances around the notion of imperium, and suggesting conflicting layers of cultural authority and material power.

The Dunciad is centrally concerned with cultural and spiritual authority. It is structured as a parody of the two defining narratives of Western civilisation: the classical translatio imperii, and the defining events of Judaeo-Christian history, from Creation to Apocalypse. Less commonly observed is the extent to which The Dunciad exploits the anti-Catholic rhetoric of British nationalism in this period. The Dunciad is steeped in the rhetoric of anti-popery and works at all levels—linguistically, structurally, and paratextually--to turn that rhetoric against itself. This paper explores the precision with which Pope utilizes the rhetoric and culture of anti-Catholicism, from the intricacies of theological debate to the crudity of public spectacle, in the Dunciad’s eschatological account. He works to blur and disrupt the binary oppositions on which the construction of British Protestant identity depended, and to suggest an alternate civilized authority associated with enlightened Catholicism, together with a model of British nationhood that can accommodate recusant beliefs.

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Lisabeth Hock, Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“Years of Change: Hedwig Dohm’s Become the Woman You Are (1894)”
The German word for menopause, Wechseljahre, translates literally as “years of change,” and is echoed by the more euphemistic English term, “the Change.” Current titles available through amazon.com and its German counterpart, amazon.de, emphasize the potential for positive change held by these years signaling the end of a woman’s reproductive cycle: These include the 2006 titles Heiße Jahre. Voller Energie durch die Wechseljahre (Hot Years: Full of Energy through the Years of Change) and Christine Northrup’s The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing During the Change, which has also been translated into German. Reflecting the confluence of feminism and medical research, one can also find titles such as the 2002 Double Menopause: What to Do When Both You and Your Mate Have Hormonal Changes Together. While such titles clearly belong to the ubiquitous genre of self-help books, they can also be read as responses to the assumption that a woman’s vocation, and thus her value, was associated with her physical function and especially with her childbearing capacity.

Neither this assumption nor critiques of it are new to the twenty-first century, of course, or even to the twentieth. This presentation will examine ways in which German author and polemicist Hedwig Ohm's 1894 novella, Werde, die du bist (Become the Woman You Are), and her 1902 essay collection, The Antifeminists, critique accounts of women’s ageing offered by late-nineteenth-century psychiatric texts. Paul Julius Möbius insisted in 1900 that women inevitably lose their intellectual powers as they age, and Emil Kraepelin offered in his psychiatric textbooks a clinical account of the connection between menopause and female madness and especially female melancholia. Dohm, while taking seriously the mind-body relationship, criticized the societal constraints and attitudes that led to breakdowns in women at the end of their childbearing years and the failure of psychiatry to ask the right questions that would be necessary to help women heal.

Christopher Leland, Professor, English
“Narrative by Other Means”
Alluding to Karl von Clausewitz last autumn struck me as a bit naughty and amusing, though events in my own life in the last months perhaps provide a warning: be careful what quotations you tweak.

As an undergraduate, I perused my poetic output, and determined that, if I could do American literature no other service, I could, at least, avoid writing any more poetry. And I stayed true to that vow, but for certain occasional verses for weddings or birthdays, for thirty years. As happens with many novelists on the downward side of fifty, however, poetry began to appeal to me again. It can be, after all, so. . . short. And a series of personal losses—the deaths of my mother and brother-in-law, of various friends—along with the ongoing debacle in the Middle East pushed me back toward this genre I long ago abandoned.

I discovered too that certain narratives perhaps lent themselves more easily to poems than I had imagined, whether brief or more extensive. And, too, I found that much of the world around me invited a literary expression that was most appropriately approached in a lyric, and that a story could be told, in its way, in a dozen lines or less.

I remain a tyro in poetry. Having so long ago left it aside, my influences, such as they are, are a grab-bag of works half-remembered or of those which, for one reason or another, I picked up on somebody’s recommendation. Hence, beyond such usual suspects as Whitman and Auden, there are moments when Vachel Linday or Edgar Lee Masters or even Stephen Vincent Benet rear up. Thom Gunn I always read and admired, though perhaps most striking of all, at least in my early efforts, was the impact of the iambic pentameter of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights I had so admired in my student days.

Andre Furtado, Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies
“Teaching Mathematics to the Scared”
The expectation in a research I university is academic rigor and excellence. The expectation in an urban university surrounded by a city with the highest adult illiteracy rate in the nation is community empowerment through the education of non-traditional students. These expectations account for an unusually diverse student body at Wayne with people at both ends of the academic spectrum. This diversity is most keenly expressed in student performance in meeting the Math Competency requirement and particularly impacts the graduation of adult and students from specific ethnic groups in non-math intensive majors. Meeting the apparently conflicting missions at Wayne may require a diversity of pedagogical approaches tailored to the academic level and learning styles of diverse student groups if all are to succeed.

Math for the Scared represents a course originally developed to serve students in the Interdisciplinary Studies and in the Chicano-Boricua Studies programs. The pedagogical evolution of this course and the gradual development of an integrated learning community involving students, advisors, tutors, and peer mentors with the instructor as orchestra leader for the learning enterprise will be traced along with student performance in instruments used to measure math competency

Specific examples of conceptual development in arithmetic that may impact later learning in algebra will be presented along with more visually based instructional materials. Impediments to success will be discussed along with approaches to help students overcome some of them. Students from the class may also be present to provide an independent perspective on the experience. Lastly a plea will be made for the creation of instruments and testing conditions to meet a given standard that can more effectively measure student learning for a diverse student group.

George Patrick Parris, Coordinator and Assistant Professor, Education
“The Impact of Trauma on Disability Adjustment and Coping”
Research indicates that an individual who experiences a trauma or is part of a traumatic event develops major psychological, social and vocational issues. The level and severity of the impact the individual experiences is dependent upon the type of trauma, nature of the condition, the individual personality, the meaning attributed to the event and the degree of family, community and social support available. Research shows that approximately 20 million individuals experiences some form of trauma due to disasters, violence or physical and emotional disability each year in the United States. This talk will address issues related to the impact of trauma and the strategies that can be utilized to effect change.

Learning Objectives
(1) Knowledge base in issues related to trauma, such as the trauma schema, adaptive capacities of individual response, Intrinsic and Extrinsic factors that affect adjustment and coping, cognitive and psychological factors that affect coping;
(2) To understand the long-term effects of trauma on adjustment and coping and the complex issues associated with treatment and interventions in addressing life-long problems;
(3) Increase awareness regarding the diverse and cultural aspects related to trauma, coping and adjustment.

Fran Shor, Professor, History
“Constructing and Contesting the American Century”
As a discursive formation first articulated in 1941 by magazine owner-editor, Henry Luce, the "American Century" served as an ideological cover for US global hegemony. This presentation will first briefly examine those institutional arrangements and political-military policies embedded in the American Century and, in the aftermath of declining US hegemony and the demise of the Soviet Empire, the re-articulated New American Century. The presentation will then consider those counter-discursive formations, identified as the European, post-colonial, and post-modern moments, and their contestation of US hegemony in order to determine the degree to which they challenge the American Century through alternative or counter-hegemonic perspectives and practices.