Kluge Center Series: Prominent Scholars on Current To...
Kluge Center Series: Prominent Scholars on Current TopicsVideo Episodes:
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18:01:51 05/25/12
Mystery of the "Place of Dog Tail"
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Anastasia Kalyuta offers a comparative analysis of land tenure and related practices of inheritance, land distribution and exploitation among Aztec nobility on the eve of Spanish conquest and aftermath. The talk explores distinctions of elite land tenure in two main centers of Aztec empire-Tenochtitlan and Tetzcoco. Speaker Biography: Anastasia Kalyuta is a scholar with the Russian Museum of Ethnography and a Kislak Fellow in American Studies. For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5504.
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13:38:28 04/17/12
Becoming Jewish Argentines
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In "Becoming Jewish Argentines: Sephardim, Marriage Choice, and the Construction of a Jewish Argentine Identity (1920-1960)," Adriana Brodsky explores the marriage patterns of Argentine Sephardic Jewish communities, paying special attention to when Sephardim began marrying Ashkenazic Jews, thereby giving birth to a new type of Jewish identity, neither fully Ashkenazic nor fully Sephardic, but Argentine. Although initially Sephardim usually married "within," as the 20th century progressed, and new spaces for interaction of Jews from different origins became available, choosing a marriage partner outside of the group became more common. The presentation suggests that loyalties to communities of origin were slowly superseded by a sense of belonging to the Argentine nation. Speaker Biography: Adriana M. Brodsky is a professor of history at St. Mary's College of Maryland and received her Ph.D. at Duke University. For captions, transcript, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5468.
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13:38:11 04/17/12
Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics
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In his recent book, ethicist William May argues that the biblical idea of a covenant, which binds people together for a common good, offers a more promising way to deal with national problems than the language of contract, which is grounded in self-interest alone. Speaker Biography: William F. May received his Ph.D. from Yale and taught for many years at Southern Methodist University where he was Cary M. Maguire Professor of Ethics until retirement in May 2001. He was the founding director of the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility. In Sept 2007 he was appointed named to the Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress. He is best known for his work in medical ethics. For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5464.
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13:37:46 04/17/12
A Train of Disasters: Puritan Reaction to New England Crisis of 1680-90s
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From the 1680-1690s, Puritan New England underwent political and cultural transformations that would eventually turn it from a Puritan "covenanted society," virtually independent of the mother country, into a much more open and secular royal province. The main political events that shaped the crisis and transformations alike are the establishment of a royal Dominion of New England in 1686 and its downfall in the bloodless Boston "revolution" of 1689, "King William's War" with the French and their Algonquin allies and, most notorious of all, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Studying a group of texts, written by political and spiritual elite, Galtsin focuses on how the Puritan colonies reacted to the turbulent decade, and how they saw it in a process of divinely ordained history. Speaker Biography: Dmitry Galtsin is with the department of book history at the Library of Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg. He is a Fulbright Fellow in the John W. Kluge Center.
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15:14:18 03/27/12
Medical Culture in Yuan China (1206-1368): Aspects of Mongol Rule and Neo-Confucian Activism
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Challenging the conventional image of Mongols as ruthless destroyers of civilizations in the 13th & 14th century world, specialists in the past few decades have examined the complex roles that Mongols played in global history. Recent historians of middle-period China have uncovered the transformation of Neo-Confucianism from a philosophy/religion for the rebellious to an ideology for political power. The Yuan period is an enormously interesting moment in global and Chinese history because the Mongol intervention in Chinese history and the transformation of Neo-Confucianism occurred at the same time and interacted with each other. These interactions resulted in a culture that valued medical learning and doctors. The life-story of a scholar-official Yuan Jue (1266-1327) will be used as a personalized window onto this complex history. Speaker Biography: Reiko Shinno is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5398.
15 Views
15:01:03 01/31/12
Murder & Martyrdom in Spanish Florida: Don Juan & the Guale Uprising of 1597
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In the late fall of 1597, Guale Indians murdered five Franciscan friars stationed in their territory and razed their missions to the ground. The 1597 Guale Uprising, or Juanillo's Revolt as it is often labeled, brought the missionization of Guale to an abrupt end and threatened Florida???s new governor with the most significant crisis of his term. This lecture explores the 1597 uprising and its aftermath, and aims to shed light on the complex nature of Spanish-Indian relations in early colonial Florida. Speaker Biography: J. Michael Francis is professor and chair of the history department at the University of North Florida. For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5384.
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14:58:06 01/31/12
Whitman's Future-Founding Poetry
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In his preface to the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman offers a programmatic statement for his entire poetic project: "Finally, as I have lived in fresh lands, inchoate, and in a revolutionary age, future-founding, I have felt to identify the points of that age, these lands, in my recitatives, altogether in my own way." Sascha Poehlmann uses Whitman's term and argues that his work can serve as a model of future-founding poetry, or poetry that aims to actively mark and perform a beginning as well as that a poets after Whitman have employed, modified, and adapted such a future-founding mode, most recently in poems on 9/11, The presentation focuses on Whitman's own poetry and prose in order to show how his cultivation of the future in the present fuses the aesthetic and the political as it negotiates openness between an uncertain and a determined future. Speaker Biography: Sascha Poehlmann is a professor at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and the 2011 Bavarian Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center. For captions, transcripts, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5383.
5 Views
20:33:12 01/30/12
Protectionist Empire: Trade, Tariffs & U.S. Foreign Policy, 1890-1914
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Ben Fordham discusses the emergence of the United States as a world power during the years prior to World War I. Speaker Biography: Benjamin Fordham is professor of Political Science at Binghamton University. His research interests concern the influence of domestic political and economic interests on foreign policy choices, especially on security issues such as military spending and the international use of force. He has published articles on the role of domestic economic performance in decisions to use military force abroad, the effect of party differences on policy choices about the use of force and the allocation of the military budget in the United States, and on the influence of economic interests on congressional voting on foreign economic and security policy matters. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5185.
9 Views
20:32:28 01/30/12
"Seeing You Is Equivalent to Being the King": Loyalty, Ethics & Piety in 16th Century India
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A look through a literary window into the politics and culture of pre-colonial South India. Christopher Chekuri examines loyalty and piety in the making of an ethical kingship during the seventeenth century. The talk will explore vernacular concepts of Hindu kingship through a close reading of the Telugu-language text Tanjavuri Andhra Rajula Caritra, which recounts the life histories of courtly figures of the 16th- and 17th-century Vijayanagara Empire. He will reveal the culture of the Nayaka elite and their state-making practices, and describe ways of reading texts and inscriptions in the study of empire and sovereignty in medieval India. Speaker Biography: Christopher Chekuri is assistant professor of at San Francisco State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include the study of states and families, early modern empires in the Indo-Islamic world, comparative colonialism and nationalism, modern Telugu literary criticism, and globalization. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5240.
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20:30:35 01/30/12
The Political Implications of Human Genomics
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A discussion on the rapid growth of genomic science, how political views and public policy have not caught up, and its likely effect on our identities and on the criminal-justice system. Speaker Biography: Jennifer L. Hochschild is Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and professor of African and African-American Studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She studies the intersection of American politics and political philosophy, particularly racial and ethnic politics and policy, immigration, educational and social policy, and public opinion or political culture. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5245.
6 Views
20:29:36 01/30/12
From Ptolemy to Pilgrimage: Images of Late Antiquity in Geography, Travel & Cartography
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A survey of Greek and Latin geographical tradition during Late Antiquity (c. 200-600 CE), when various genres of travel narrative rose to prominence. Scott Johnson links this mode of writing to the transition from a pagan/Greco-Roman world to a Christian one as new ways of explaining the known world mixed the classical inheritance with biblical and early Christian history. This mixture was to influence directly the new institution of Christian pilgrimage, while setting a foundation of religious practice for Byzantium, Islam and the western Middle Ages. Speaker Biography: Scott Johnson received his doctorate in classics from the University of Oxford in 2005. He is a postdoctoral teaching Fellow in Byzantine Greek at Georgetown University and Dumbarton Oaks. He has been a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2004-07), a fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (2009-10), and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (2010-11). His current research project, "All the World's Knowledge: Geographical Thought in Late Antiquity and Byzantium," is designed to form the basis of his next book. For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5241.
3 Views
20:27:51 01/30/12
Early Cartography of Panama & Darien
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Due to its role as a world's crossroads, the Isthmus of Panama has been one of the most mapped regions in the Americas. Hernan Arauz examines some of Panama's most significant maps and their interpretation and how the feats of the early conquistadors, buccaneers, surveyors and explorers influenced the development of cartography there. Speaker Biography: Hernan Arauz is a Kislak Fellow at the Library of Congress, where he is studying descriptive and interpretative carto-bibliography of the maps of Panama and Darien from the 16th Century to 1865. In his native Panama, he is well-known as the country's most experienced and respected naturalist guide. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5117.
1 Views
20:26:32 01/30/12
The Jihadis' Path to Self-Destruction
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 20:26:32 01/30/12
Do contemporary jihadists hold, in their own doctrine, the seeds to self-destruction? Nelly Lahoud, a top expert on jihadi ideology and a West Point associate professor, discusses this topic, the subject of her new book of the same name. Speaker Biography: Nelly Lahoud is associate professor with the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) in the Department of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy, West Point. Prior to joining CTC, Lahoud was assistant professor of Political Theory, including Islamic Political Thought, at Goucher College. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at the Research School of Social Sciences' Australian National University. In 2003, she was a postdoctoral scholar at St John's College, University of Cambridge, UK. In 2005, she was a Rockefeller Fellow in Islamic studies at the Library of Congress. Her publications include "Political Thought in Islam: A Study in Intellectual Boundaries" (2005) and co-editor (with A.H. Johns) of "Islam in World Politics" (2005). For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5154.
5 Views
20:26:14 01/30/12
Shaping Physics in the Three Nations
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Kluge Fellow Josep Simon spoke on the role of pedagogy and the importance of international scientific communication in the making of modern science, particularly physics. Speaker Biography: Josep Simon completed his thesis on 19th-century physics teaching in international perspective. With extensive training in the curatorship of scientific instruments at museums in Valencia and Oxford, he is author of a guide for novices to instrument cataloging and co-author of a catalog of physics instruments in the Valencia collection. For transcript, captions, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5205.
6 Views
20:25:46 01/30/12
The Making of Soviet Central Asia, 1917-1932
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Adeeb Khalid discusses the transformation of culture and identity in Central Asia during the early years of Soviet rule and how the transformations in culture came not from Moscow, but from the Central Asian people themselves and how their new identity fostered a growing modernity that shaped the region as it is today. Speaker Biography: Adeeb Khalid is Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College. A historian of modern Central Asia, he is the author "The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia" and "Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia." He has lived and studied in Uzbekistan, Russia, Turkey, and Pakistan, and travelled al over Central Asia. For captions, transcript, or more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5213.
10 Views
20:24:41 01/30/12
Skulls, Scalps and Seminoles: Science and Violence in Florida, 1800-1842
[LESS INFO] 10 VIEWS | ADDED 20:24:41 01/30/12
Exploration of the history of science in Florida during the decades before and after the beginning of U.S. governance in 1821. The lecture emphasizes the context of violence in Florida shaped scientific practices in the region as well as knowledge circulating throughout the United States of Florida's native peoples and natural history. The overlap between science and violence reached its climax during the Second Seminole War, when U.S. Army surgeons and other amateur naturalists were both the targets of Seminole attacks and the perpetrators of brutalities against Florida's Indians. Most notably, white naturalists in Florida collected, analyzed, mutilated, and exported the remains of Florida's Indian dead, particularly the skulls of both long-buried and recently killed Seminoles. Although they carried out their grisly work in an isolated region, the practices, specimens, and ideas of these skull collectors had a lasting influence on scientific approaches to Indian remains throughout the United States. Speaker Biography: Cameron B. Strang was a resident scholar in the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5237.
01/27/12