Academic Affairs

Academic Affairs ACADEMIC AFFAIRS

Inaugural Lecture: Cates Baldridge

4:30 PM ET

Sponsored by:: Academic Affairs

Seeking the All-Sufficient Word: Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness, and Disgrace Inaugural Lecture Professor Cates Baldridge, Department of English and American Literatures

Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Open to the Public

Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series: Michael Sheridan

4:30 PM ET

Sponsored by:: Academic Affairs

Roots of Power: Ethnobotany and the Social Production of Space in Tropical Agrarian Societies There is great cultural continuity in the usage and significance of a particular plant species across tropical Africa. The Dracaena plant relates to property rights, grave marking, and peace symbolism throughout the region – not as a broad swath of meaning, but rather as a landscape element and social practice that appears again and again in diverse societies.

Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Open to the Public

Cartographies of Translation: Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love Between English and Arabic

4:30 PM ET

Sponsored by:: Academic Affairs

Dima Ayoub, Department of Arabic, will give a lecture as part of the Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series titled, “Cartographies of Translation: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love Between English and Arabic”.

This lecture will examine Ahdaf Soueif’s novel The Map of Love alongside its Arabic translation, Kharitat al-hubb (translated by Fatma Musa) in particular focusing on the translatability of translational literature into Arabic.

Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Open to the Public

Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series

4:30 PM ET

Sponsored by:: Academic Affairs

Dog Meat Politics: Masculinity and Power in a Vietnamese Town Israel Institute Visiting Professor Nir Avieli, Program in Modern Hebrew will give a Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture. There were only a couple of semi-clandestine dog-meat restaurants in the town of Hoi An in Central Vietnam in 1999. In 2004 there were dozens, serving mostly male members of the newly emerging Hoianese middle class. In this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hoi An since 1998, I follow the sudden popularity of dog meat in town and discuss its meanings.

Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Open to the Public

Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series

4:30 PM ET

Sponsored by:: Academic Affairs

Poetry and Logocentrism: Reading Octavio Paz from Jacques Derrida’s Perspective Professor Mario Higa, Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Octavio Paz’s poetry is built upon tensions. However, one of these tensions becomes an impasse when viewed from a Derridean perspective. In my lecture, I will point out and analyze this impasse, which involves both the notion of logos and the concept of Nietzschean affirmation as defined by Jacques Derrida in his critique of logocentrism. Ultimately, the unresolved impasse in Octavio Paz’s poetic works finds an outlet in his political thought.

Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Open to the Public

Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series: Alicia Peaker

4:30 PM ET

Sponsored by:: Academic Affairs

Digital Readings and “Ferny, Mossy Discoveries”: Visualizing the Natural Worlds of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth. Lecture by Alicia Peaker, Center for Teaching, Learning & Research. How might the ecosystems and biospheres of novels be represented digitally? Can we develop useful digital models for contextualizing human characters within the fictional natural worlds they inhabit? And what impacts might such models have on the ways we read and understand literatures of the environment?

Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Free
Open to the Public