Research Workshops
Call for Proposals, 2012-2013

AKIH Research Workshops, interdisciplinary groups brought together by shared interests, comprise faculty and graduate students from Northwestern and other local institutions. Workshop conveners organize all meetings (at least two per quarter) as well as any special lectures or events.

2011-12 Institute Research Workshops

The After-Life of Phenomenology

Conveners: Penelope Deutscher; Sanford Goldberg; Deborah Goldgaber; Ivan Ivanov

This workshop is premised on the idea that revising the paradigms through which perception is conceived can lead to significant rethinking of its nature and epistemic significance-and of the way that we view consciousness. This is so because of the longstanding tie between models of perception, particularly vision, and models of consciousness.  Vision has long served as the model for conceiving perception both in the sciences, esp. the “brain” sciences and in philosophy. Moreover, perception has nearly always been thought in term of consciousness and as necessarily accompanied by consciousness. These two assumptions underlie the influential approach to perception known as phenomenology. Within recent empirical approaches to the brain, two traditional dogmas of phenomenology are challenged. First, the specificity of particular perceptual modalities calls the dominant visual model of conceiving perception into question. Secondly, the recognition of what has been termed “unconscious” perception (e.g. blindsight) severs the established link between perception and consciousness, and the two have, since, been thought separately.  In fields like film and media studies the question of whether aesthetic media represents, mimics or, more strongly, constitutes perception is widely debated.

Here are the main sets of issues we aim to discuss:
(1) What are the distinctive features of less well explored perceptual modalities, such as hearing, taste, smell and touch? Are there any additional modalities we should include (e.g. facial recognition, kinaesthetic awareness)? If “general features” (e.g. constancy, figure-ground distinction, qualitative character, synchronic or diachronic unity, modularity, global accessibility) are absent, in what sense can phenomenological method be a reliable and generally applicable means of studying perception?
(2) How should we think about the category of “unconscious” perception? Need consciousness play an important, perhaps even an essential, role in perception? Do critical responses to the phenomenological concept of “consciousness” cause us to rethink what is meant by consciousness in the first place or abandon it altogether?  Depending on the answers, should the phenomenological project be retained in some form or should it be given up in full?
(3) Having critically explored phenomenological approaches to these general issues we aim to consider what arguably is most compelling and most complex in phenomenological theory:  the temporal model of experience which underlies it.  The question of the experience of time and the temporality of experience has, historically, been seen as constituting a limiting feature of phenomenological theory.  Is there a way to provide a satisfying purely phenomenological account of time-consciousness?

Our aim is not to attempt to synthesize frameworks or approaches but rather to arrive at an awareness of operative presuppositions, to see the frames within which disciplines work and attempt, where possible, to see where problems intersect fruitfully.

Classical Receptions

Conveners: S. Sara Monoson; Marianne Hopman; Katie Hartsock

"Classical receptions” is an emerging field of research that examines the complex relationships between, on the one hand, the literary and material record of classical antiquity and, on the other, its uses by various authors and actors working in a wide array of media and civic contexts at specific moments in later periods (e.g., visual artists, journalists, political activists, academics, drama, fiction, television, film, etc.). Its aim is twofold: to illuminate the peculiarities and concerns of the receiving culture (by reading uses of antiquity in rich context) and to generate fresh insights into the meaning of the ancient sources in their own time (by stripping away layers of expectations and readings that have colored interpretations). Our Kaplan workshop follows up on the Classics Department’s two years of seminars on ancient drama from a reception studies standpoint (2008-10 Mellon Sawyer Series). In 2010-11 we moved away from drama to focus on examining the methodological underpinnings of receptions work in general and on supporting faculty and graduate students' interests in gaining familiarity with the possibilities for receptions work on other forms of cultural production (esp. politics and literature). The 2011-12 year will allow our core participants to develop their research and teachign projects. We will host sessions on the works-in-progress of our own members as well as invite outside scholars to address similar issues in their own research. The workshop will also create an NU-based website, up and running September 2011, that will function as the North American hub for the international classical reception studies e-network.

Comparative Modernisms

Conveners: Christopher Bush; César Braga-Pinto; Tara Rodman

Much of the vital contemporary scholarship on aesthetic modernism is driven by the imperative to rethink “modernism” from a more transnational, even global perspective. However, the geographic and linguistic expansiveness of this new field presents considerable challenges to even the most ambitious of scholars. There is therefore a need for collaborative work and dialogue across traditional national specializations as well as across disciplines. The Comparative Modernisms Workshop will address this need by fostering a dialogue among Northwestern professors and graduate students working in diverse national and artistic traditions, specifically encouraging participants to work outside their comfort zones and generate a broader conception of modernism.

The immediate goal of the workshop will be to offer a series of what might be called “advanced introductions” to modernisms outside the participants’ normal areas of study. The program will consist of three components:

(1) A reading group organized around a different major literary or artistic work each quarter, accompanied by appropriate critical, historical, and comparative readings. Participants will thus gain some fluency with major works from around the globe and be able to track how various aesthetic movements transform and take root in different locations. Each quarter during the 2011-12 academic year we will have a different national focus, with a different national theme, emphasizing a different set of critical questions (see below).
(2) A speaker series: each quarter we will bring in one major speaker in that quarter’s national-artistic area, also inviting an appropriate respondent from Northwestern.
(3) The creation of an interdisciplinary social network of modernist scholars at Northwestern. We will set up an informal network via Blackboard Learn or a similar application, which we can be used for the immediate needs of the reading group and the speaker series, but also as a general forum in which participants can share work, forward links and resources, make announcements about local events of interest to the group, and carry on discussions outside of scheduled meetings.

The exact contents of the year’s readings and speakers will ultimately be determined in dialogue with those who participate in the workshop, but as a sample program we propose the following:

In the fall we will be introduced to Brazilian modernist poetry, emphasizing concrete poetry and the work Haraldo de Campos. In the winter we will learn about the visual cultures of Chinese urban modernism, focusing on Shanghai with a particular emphasis on 1) the notion of genre film as a “vernacular modernism” and 2) artistic crosscurrents between China and Germany.
In the spring we will study literary naturalism in Japan. Our principal work will be Shimazaki Toson’s novel Broken Commandment (1906), in addition to which we will read some of the founding documents of naturalism (such as Emile Zola’s the “The Experimental Novel”), Katai Tayama’s short story “The Quilt” (1907), and secondary articles on Japanese naturalism.

It is our hope that this format will provide the right balance of focus and open-endedness, allowing scholars from different fields to find common points of departure for a productive interdisciplinary conversation.

Latin American Criticism and Theory

Conveners: César Braga-Pinto; Jorge Coronado; Casey Drosehn

The Latin American criticism and theory reading group began as a way to provide an informal symposium that would bring faculty and students together who work on Latin American topics. Discussion would center on recent scholarship in Latin American studies, the idea being to give students a sense of current debates, and to equip them with conceptual tools for their own work. Both students and faculty responded enthusiastically to the idea of forming such a group.  In the monthly meetings the group has had since its organization, attendance has included both professors and graduate students from Political Science, Anthropology, Performance Studies, History, Rhetoric and Public Culture, and Comparative Literary Studies. Our regional interests account for all of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America. We select the readings together under the guidance of the faculty, and meet once a month for about two hours to discuss these readings.

In the coming 2011-2012 year, we anticipate meeting eight times, with a more formal colloquium taking place in the Winter or Spring quarter. Thus far the reading group has been coordinating readings with speakers already scheduled to visit, but in the coming year we are considering inviting at least one speaker.

Modernism and Visuality

Conveners: Jacqueline Stewart; Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece; David Van Zanten

The status of the visible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is fraught, complex, and continually provocative. By the end of the nineteenth century, rapid changes in industry, communication, technology, travel, and urban everyday life resulted in unprecedented experiences of upheaval. New art forms such as film, photography, and modern architecture and art considered or compensated for a perceived change in the spectator’s relationship to her environment. In the midst of such flux, it is no surprise that modernism’s definition was and remains slippery at best; understanding modern objects requires examining the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic systems in which they are constructed and the ways in which they operate across multiple boundaries. Art, architecture, film, design, and literature become thrillingly fluid categories in modernism, linked by their investment in the power of vision.

Modernism and Visuality will be an interdisciplinary workshop dedicated to parsing these concerns and the ways in which they illuminate changes in the status of the visual in modern experience. Our focus will be the most powerfully recognizable modernist and mid-century modernist visual objects (such as film, architecture, and art), as well as some literary works that also concern the visual. Activities for the workshop will include two seminar-length meetings per quarter. The first meeting of each quarter will be a reading and discussion group centered on a book dealing with aspects of the workshop’s theme. The second meeting of each quarter will be dedicated to discussing a collection of shorter essays and/or books or book chapters related to themes brought up in meeting one but providing a different perspective, methodology, or approach. Student organizers will choose essays or books related to their additional fields of study (art history, architecture, technology, anthropology, travel, and animation) to encourage interdiscipinarity. We plan also on incorporating supplementary screenings of clips and/or short films into reading group meetings or integrating them as required viewing prior to meeting time. Members of the group will be expected to be available to critique other members’ work; we will set aside time for group critique during second meetings of each quarter as members request it. In addition to these group discussion meetings, each quarter we will host a lecture event that will be open to the public. Fall and winter quarter guest lecturers will be drawn from campus and/or area universities. In the spring, we will bring a guest speaker from outside the area for a special event. Our spring reading group will read a book written by the special guest speaker in order to maximize the benefits gained from his/her visit.

Transnationalism, Dialogue, Politics

Convener: Jorge Coronado; Jessica Greenberg; Elliot Heilman

The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2010-11 Research Workshop, “Tricontinentalism, Dialogue, Politics,” brought together graduate students and faculty from across the humanities at Northwestern University for a sustained and engaging discussion of the global circuits of Third World Solidarity movements across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. The attempt to understand the past anti-colonial struggles in terms of mobile solidarities within the enlarged horizons of tricontinentalism generated new insights as well as problems for pursuing post-colonials studies in the present. The talks and workshops demonstrated, among other things, how the post-colonial condition should not be imagined or understood exclusively in terms of its relation to the colonizing agent. Instead, one should think of post-coloniality as a node—a chronotopic point of intersection—of global solidarity networks.

The proposed 2011-12 workshop, “Transnationalism, Dialogue, Politics,” builds upon the success of the past two workshops (“Freire Forty Years Later” and “Tricontinentalism, Dialogue, Politics”) in this series, but redirects the focus toward a more transnational frame. Post-colonial studies, expanding upon the theoretical interventions of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabba, have articulated compelling and important interventions in imperialist traditions. However, the post-colonial approach also has limitations, as it relies upon the colonized/colonizer binary and primarily treats major figures and texts, leaving unaddressed objects that fit neither into binaries of race, diaspora, or colonialism, nor within major interpretive traditions. By contrast, transnational agents or objects are defined by their mobility, rather than by a national context and are often minor. This workshop aims to foster examinations of how the transnational figure operates and what its implications are for new objects of study and how they constitute global networks. Next year’s workshop will propose that these new discursive spheres cut across traditional boundaries of nation and discipline and thereby offer alternative scholarly methodologies.

We expect the proposed 2011-12 workshop to continue and extend the discussion and work of “Tricontinentalism, Dialogue, Politics” into a sustained, energetic, and dedicated inquiry into the ways in which we can understand a minoritarian, oppositional, humanistic politics in a way that avoids reliance on standard binaries in the context of a global and neoliberal present.

Other Workshops

The Institute hosts the weekly Culture and Society workshop, led by Wendy Griswold. For more information, please see the Culture and Society web site or contact the culture and society at workshop@gmail.com

 

 

Past Workshops