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2015 Working Group Activities


Funded 2015 Pre-Endowment Period Events

PHILOSOPHY

PHI1: Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop (SPAWN)
July 29 – 31, 2015: SPAWN 2015, Syracuse University
SPAWN is Syracuse Philosophy Department’s annual summer conference.

PHI2: Creighton Club
October 17, 2015: Creighton Club, Syracuse University
The Creighton Club is an annual philosophy conference that takes place at varying locations in Upstate New York, with its primary participants being from Syracuse, Rochester, Cornell, and surrounding universities and colleges. The Creighton Club is a one-day conference that takes place in the Fall Semester; it typically features four to five talks with commentators, including a dedicated session for a graduate student talk. There is always a distinguished keynote speaker who almost always comes from a location outside of Upstate New York, sometimes substantially outside upstate New York.

PHI3: Upstate New York Early Modern Philosophy (UNYWEMP)
March 16-18, 2015: Allison Laywine (McGill), Cornell University
March 20-24, 2015: Tobias Rosefeldt (Humboldt-Berlin) & Stefanie Gruene (Potsdam), Cornell University

PHI4: Graduate Student Exchange
Spring & Fall 2015: Graduate Student Corridor Exchange, Corridor-Wide
Each year several of graduate students take courses or attend events at other Corridor institutions, especially Cornell and Rochester.

PHI6: Continental Philosophy
March 7, 2015: Workshop, Biopolitics: New Directions, Cornell University
Biopolitics as a contemporary object of study and an analytic framework has proliferated in multiple discursive fields in the humanities and social sciences. This proliferation far outweighs the initial articulation of the concept in Michel Foucault’s 1970s lectures. Thus, Biopolitics is often used in contradictory ways to refer to questions as heterogeneous as the war on terror, the female reproductive body, neoliberalism, the human genome project, and the prison industrial complex.

PHI7: Ancient Philosophy
October 16 – 17, 2015: International Reading Workshop,Virtue and Emotion in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics IV.5-9, Union College
A two-day workshop to engage in a close-reading of the accounts of honor, anger, shame, and witness in Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethicsand discussion of the minor virtues (liberality, friendliness, wittiness, honesty in self-presentation, and the like). These virtues (minor in comparison to the four Cardinal Virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom) have played an important role not only in ancient discussions of moral psychology and the role of sociality in a virtuous life, but also in contemporary discussions of “thick ethical descriptions” and the semantics of moral terminology.

PHI8: Late Antiquity
January 30, 2015: Seminar on Liturgy and Aesthetics, Cornell University
Reading group on Derek Krueger’s Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
April 10 – 11, 2015: Symposium on Aesthetics in Late Antiquity, Syracuse University
Keynote by Derek Krueger followed by five papers, one respondent, and a seminar on the fourth-century poet Prudentius.

PHI9: CNY Ethics Reading Group
November 6, 2015: CNY Ethics Reading Group Workshop Meeting, University of Rochester
Discussion of paper-in-progress.

LINGUISTICS

LIN4: The Syntax-Semantics Interface
November 14 – 15, 2015: Relative Clause Workshop, Cornell University
This workshop brings specialists from the region, Canada, and Japan to discuss the topic of prehead relative clauses: relative clauses that precede the noun they modify. This syntactic pattern is found widely across the languages of the world, but in most of the languages of East Asia it is the only pattern. Relative clauses of this type have long raised questions from the standpoint of natural language processing as well as syntactic theory. Participants include specialists in computational and experimental linguistics as well as syntax. Invited speakers for the workshop include C.-T. James Huang (Harvard University), Chung-hye Han (Simon Fraser University), Anna Bugaeva (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguisitcs), and Iku Nagasaki (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics).

LIN6: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Discourse
November 7 – 8, 2015: Fifth Cornell Workshop in Linguistics and Philosophy Communicating Attitudes , Cornell University
This workshop explores interdisciplinary research on how we communicate our unique first-person perspective on the world, and how we communicate one person’s perspective to a third person. Psychologists, philosophers and linguists have recently produced a lot of new ideas for understanding what people convey with first-person attitude descriptions like “I want to see outerspace” as well as third-person attitude descriptions like “Zoe believes that she will travel to outerspace”. This workshop brings together researchers for a two-day workshop to further integrate their ideas on this exciting intellectual frontier.

VISUAL ARTS AND CULTURE

VAC1: New Approaches to Scholarship & Pedagogy of Ottoman and Turkish Architecture
February 17, 2015: Guest Lecture in History of Architecture, Esra Akcan(Cornell University), Open Architecture and the Noncitizen: Urban Renewal of Berlin Kreuzberg, IBA 1984/87, University of Rochester
February 19, 2015: Guest Lecture in History of Architecture, Peter Christensen (University of Rochester), Reflections on Late Ottoman Architecture: Reform, Foreigners, and Modernization, Cornell University
November 9, 2015: Guest Lecture in History of Architecture, Mary Roberts (University of Sydney / Clark Art Institute), Istanbul Exchanges in a Global Context, University of Rochester

VAC2: Critical Asian Cinematic Spaces
April 11, 2015: Seminar, Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia at Cornell University
The seminar seeks to identify overlapping areas of research concerned with the historical growth of cities, contemporary urban conditions, and cinema in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. It brings together scholars of film and architecture in from Syracuse University, Cornell University, Hamilton College, Siena College, Vassar, Thammasat University (Thailand), to share and discuss the conjoined genealogies of Asian cinema, urban morphologies, and architecture. Participants circulate a suggested reading and a film before the meeting and present a brief synopsis of their current research interests.
October 31, 2015: Fall Workshop, Double Happiness, Syracuse University
Workshop and screening of Ella Raidel’s “Double Happiness” documentary on urbanization in Shenzhen, China. Raidel’s film examines the reproduction of an Austrian tourist town near the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen in China.

VAC4: New Media Art Practice (nMAP)
February 26 – 27, 2015: Workshop and Performance, Expressive Machines Musical Instruments (EMMI), Syracuse University/Colgate University

VAC17: Global Biennale
September 14, 2015: Korean Art and Culture, Lecture, Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University), Traveling Poetry, Traveling Theory, and the Humanities, Cornell University
September 16, 2015: Korean Art and Culture, Lecture, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee (Kyung Hee University), Humanities and Plastic Surgery: The Logic of Human Capital in South Korea, Cornell University

MUSICOLOGY AND MUSIC HISTORY

MMH17: Teaching Exchange
April 23, 2015: Holly Watkins (Eastman School of Music), Lecture for Benjamin Piekut’s Music 7206: John Cage and the Avant-Garde, Cornell University
November 4, 2015: Roger Moseley (Cornell University), Lecture for Melina Esse’s MUY 591, 591: Improvisation in the 19th-Century, Eastman School of Music
November 14, 2015: Steven Doane (Eastman School of Music), Lecture for Xak Bjerken’s Music 4651: Chamber Music Seminar
November 16, 2015: Melina Esse (Eastman School of Music), Lecture for Roger Moseley’s Music 7501: Graduate Seminar on Improvisation in 18th and 19th-Century European Music, Cornell University

MMH21: Mobilizing Music – Gender and Performativity
April 22 – 24, 2015: Caribbean Artists Rita Indiana and Noella Quintero, Writing, Performing, Producing Difference, Syracuse University
Acclaimed Dominican novelist, musician, and performance artist Rita Indiana and Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero present talks, performances, screenings, and discussions examining the intersections of contemporary Caribbean identities, politics, and gender in their creative work.
October 2 – 6, 2015: Patience Chaitezvi, Women in Mbira Performance, University of Rochester
Residency with Zimbabwean mbira performer and scholar, Patience Chaitezvi.

MMH22: Performance/History
September 25, 2015: Reading Group, Staging the Blues, Colgate University
Discussion of the recently published bookStaging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourismby Paige McGinley (Duke Univ. Press, 2014), covering a wide range of topics: the blues as theatrical event, theoretical and methodological approaches to art and entertainment, disciplinary biases, and identity politics and intersectionality in performance (particularly around gender and race).

MMH24: Re-Sounding History
February 10, 2015: Dr. Joyce Hillsman, Re-Sounding Gospel, Syracuse University
African American music historian, composer, author, and board member of the Gospel Workshop of America, Dr. Joyce Hillman draws on her vast experience to demonstrate how gospel’s historical roots inform its practice today.
March 5 & 6, 2015: Odglasi, Re-Sounding Macedonia, Syracuse University & Colgate University
A band of performer-scholars who have studied and played traditional Macedonian music for years, Odglasi uses vocals, percussion, strings, winds, and Balkan cultural history to create new musical energies.
April 23 & 24, 2015: B. Balasubrahmaniyan and David Nelson, Re-Sounding South India, Syracuse University & Hamilton College
They studied voice and mridangam with master Karnataka musicians for years. Their dedication has transformed them into scholar-performers who now pass on the tradition.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES

DH8: Digital Humanities Speaker Series
November 23, 2015: Lecture on Digital Humanities: Sharon Daniel (UC, Santa Cruz), Cornell University

LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE

LLC2: The Chinese Quest for Modernity: from the Religious Perspective
April 17, 2015: Preliminary Meeting and talk by Professor Thomas Wilson (Hamilton College), Conceptions of Heaven and God in the Imperial Cults of China, University of Rochester
September 22, 2015: Workshop and Lecture by Michael Puett (Harvard), Disjunctions, Substitutions, and Artifice: Divinities, Rituals, and Ritual Theory in Classical China, University of Rochester
October 23, 2015: Lecture by Robert P. Weller (Boston University), Urban Expansion and Religious Innovation in Contemporary China, University of Rochester

LLC3: Early Modern Thinking
April 10, 2015: Talk on Seventeenth Century British Literary Studies, Sharon Achinstein (Johns Hopkins University), Syracuse University
April 30, 2015: Talk on Seventeenth Century British Literary Studies, David Norbrook (Oxford University), Syracuse University

LLC6: Nineteenth Century Studies
October 24, 2015: Victorian Interventions, Syracuse University
While taking as their objects very different aspects of Victorian culture, recent books by Professors Supritha Rajan and Elisha Cohn both make important interventions into the field of Victorian Studies by bringing together discourses long thought antithetical to one another and showing how a submerged discourse or impulse actually plays a constitutive role in a field where it has seemed alien, if not anathema. Professor Rajan examines the discourses of the sacred that are threaded through the emergent nineteenth-century discourses of political economy, while Professor Cohn examines “lyric” moments—moments of suspended consciousness—that trouble the teleological bildung of the Victorian novel.

LLC8: Religion and Literature
October 1 – 3, 2015:Sacred Literature, Secular Religion: A Conference on Cultural Practices, Syracuse, NY
Charles Taylor recently claimed that we live in “a secular age,” one in which a wide range of religious practices – and ways to opt out of those practices – are available. Today we might follow traditional forms of observance, establish new kinds of worship that are not strictly religious, or reject devotional pursuits altogether. Is Taylor right, or have these options always existed in varying degrees, in various periods and places? This conference explores how religious and secular concerns overlap and inform modes of belief and forms of pious (and impious) expression. Rather than approach the sacred and the secular in dualistic terms, we seek ways to understand how the categories intersect and criss-cross. Rather than simply map religion onto literature or vice versa, we invite papers that conceptualize and describe the interrelation between the two.

LLC9: Critical Theory and the Global – The Politics of Translation
March 7, 2015: Multi-Media Workshop Still Hear the Wound: Art, Affect, and Post-Colonial Memory in Japan, Cornell University
The workshop represent the culmination of a two-year collaborative process, and bringing together scholars from Japan, Korea, and the United States involved in the project. The translated text, Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art To Come, edited by Lee Chonghwa is a volume of essays on contemporary multi-media art works dealing with legacies of Japanese colonial violence in Okinawa and Korea. Remembrances of, and the question of how to gain restitution for, victims of such incidents as the Battle of Okinawa, the Jeju Massacre of 1948, and the former “comfort women” are themes of many of the essays involved
March 7, 2015: CNY Corridor Lecture,On the Thresholds of Language and Music: Song As a Resource in the Lives of Survivors of the Comfort Women, Joshua Pilzer (University of Toronto), Cornell University. Professor Pilzer’s talk addresses questions of memory, translation, and justice.

LLC11: Perspectives on Europe from the Periphery
May 15, 2015: Planning Meeting, Syracuse University
October 29, 2015: Lecture, Turkish Westerns: European Cinema, Knowledge, Counter-History, Randall Halle (University of Pittsburgh), Syracuse University
Faculty/research talk presented by Dr. Randall Halle, Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh. This talk will consider the genre of Turkish Westerns and the strategies of popular film production in Turkey from a practice of rip-off remakes to stand-up satire. It will explore how this shift in “Hollywood” style stories actually represents a process of Europeanization in culture and economy.
October 30, 2015: Workshop, Discussion of the Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities, Randall Halle (University of Pittsburgh), Syracuse University
Workshop with pre-circulated readings presented by Dr. Randall Halle, Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

LLC13: Alguien al otro lado
February 16-18, 2015: Roundtable & Reading by Poets Ana Merino, Manuel Vilas, and Luis Munoz, Syracuse University & Le Moyne College

LLC15: Facismo
April 17, 2015: International Conference, ‘Facismo: Making, Thinking, and Imagining History’, University of Rochester

LLC16: CNY Poets and Writers
September 24, 2015: Screenwriting Master Class with writer, actor, director, producer Josh Radnor, Colgate University

2015 WORKING GROUP COORDINATORS

PHI1
Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network (SPAWN)
Ben Bradley,Chair, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University
Robert Van Gulick,Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University                                 

PHI2
Creighton Club
Ben Bradley,Chair, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University
Kristopher McDaniel,Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University

PHI3
Upstate New York Workshop in Early Modern Philosophy (UNYWEMP)
Kara Richardson,Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse
Andrew Chignell,Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, Cornell University

Alison Peterman, Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, University of Rochester
Marie Jayasekera, Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, Colgate University

PHI6
Continental Philosophy
Tim Murray,Professor, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University
Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, Syracuse University

PHI7
Ancient Philosophy Working Group
Tad Brennan, Professor, Philosophy Department, Cornell University
Deborah Modrak,Professor, Philosophy Department, University of Rochester
Krisanna Scheiter, John D. MacArthur Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, Union College

PHI8
Late Antiquity Working Group
Georgia Frank,Professor, Department of Religion, Colgate University
Virginia Burrus, Professor, Department of Religion, Syracuse University
Suzanne Abrams Rebillard, Visiting Scholar, Classics, Cornell University
Kim Haines-Eitzen, Professor, Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University

PHI9
Central New York Ethics Reading Group
Hille Paakkunainen,Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University
Kate Manne, Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, Cornell University
William FitzPatrick, Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, University of Rochester

LIN4
Workshop on the Syntax-Semantics Interface
John Whitman,Professor, Linguistics Department, Cornell University
Jaklin Kornfilt, Professor, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Syracuse University
Jeff Runner, Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester

LIN6
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Linguistics
Sarah Murray, Assistant Professor, Linguistics Department, Cornell University

William Starr, Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department, Cornell University
Janice Dowell, Professor, Philosophy Department, Syracuse University

VAC1
New Approaches to Scholarship & Pedagogy of Ottoman and Turkish Architecture
Esra Akcan, Associate Professor, Architecture, Cornell University
Peter Christensen, Assistant Professor, Art History, University of Rochester

VAC2
Critical Asian Cinematic Spaces
Lawrence Chua, Assistant Professor, Architecture, Syracuse University
Arnika Fuhrmann, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, Cornell University
Wang Zhuoyi, Assistant Professor, Chinese Department, Hamilton College

VAC4
New Media Art Practice (nMap)
Wenhua Shi, Assistant Professor, Art and Art History, Colgate University
Fernando Orellana,Associate Professor, Visual Arts, Union College
Rebecca Ruige Xu, Associate Professor, Department of Transmedia, Syracuse University

VAC17
Global Biennale
Tim Murray,Professor, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University

Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, Syracuse University

MMH17
Teaching Exchange
Xak Bjerken, Professor, Music, Cornell University
Roger Freitas, Associate Professor, Eastman School of Music: Musicology, University of Rochester
Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Associate Professor, Art & Music Histories, Syracuse University

MMH21
Mobilizing Music
Sydney Hutchinson, Assistant Professor, Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University
Alejandro Madrid, Associate Professor, Music, Cornell University
Jennifer Kyker,Assistant Professor, Eastman School of Music: Musicology, University of Rochester

MMH22
Performance/History
Christian DuComb, Assistant Professor, English Department, Colgate University

Charity Lofthouse, Instructor, Music Department, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Mary Simonson, Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies, Colgate University
Byron Suber, Senior Lecturer, Performing Arts and Media, Cornell University

MMH24
Re-Sounding History
Deborah Justice, Faculty Fellow, Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University
Sydney Hutchinson, Assistant Professor, Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University
Lydia Hamessley, Professor, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Hamilton
Mary Simonson, Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies, Colgate University College
Peter Steele, Visiting Assistant Professor, Charles Dana Arts Center, Colgate University

DH8 Cornell
Digital Humanities Speaker Series
Tim Murray, Professor, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University

LLC2
The Chinese Quest for Modernity: From the Religious Perspective
Shin-yi Chao, Associate Professor, Religion, University of Rochester
Gareth Fisher, Assistant Professor, Religion, Syracuse University
Elya Zhang, Assistant Professor, History, University of Rochester

LLC3
Early Modern Thinking
Rayna Kalas, Associate Professor, Department of English, Cornell University
Crystal Bartolovich, Associate Professor, English Department, Syracuse University

LLC9
Critical Theory and the Global: The Politics of Translation
Brett de Bary, Professor, Asian Studies, Cornell University
Naoki Sakai, Professor, Asian Studies, Cornell University
Meera Lee, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies, Syracuse University

LLC11
Perspectives on Europe from the Periphery
Karina von Tippelskirch, Assistant Professor, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics – German, Syracuse University
Stefano Giannini, Associate Professor, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics – Italian, Syracuse University
Kathryn Everly, Associate Professor, Languages Literatures & Linguistics, Syracuse University
Patrizia McBride, Chair, Department of German Studies, Cornell University

LLC13
Alguien al otro lado
Kathryn Everly, Associate Professor, Languages Literatures & Linguistics, Syracuse University
Joana Sabadell-Nieto, Professor, Hispanic Studies, Hamilton College

LLC15
Facismo
Matthew BaileyShea, Humanities Project Committee Chair, Associate Professor of Music, University of Rochester
Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio, Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Cultures – Italian, University of Rochester

LLC16
CNY Poets and Writers
Greg Ames, Assistant Professor, English, Colgate University
Bruce Smith, Professor, English Department, Syracuse University
Christopher Kennedy, Director MFA Program in Creative Writing and Associate Professor, English Department, Syracuse University
Peter Balakian, Donald M. and Constance H Rebar Professor in Humanities; Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing, English Department, Colgate University
Jane Springer, Assistant Professor, English Department, Hamilton College