Upcoming Events

SPEAKERS AND EVENTS 2011-2012 

Podcasts for  2010-2011 Humanities Center lectures are available on DePaul University I-Tunes.
I-Tunes > Lecture Series > DePaul Humanities Center

                                                               All events are FREE and OPEN to the public.

SPRING QUARTER 2012

2011-2012 SERIES: LITERATURE AND MUSIC

Michael Jackson, Queer World Making and the Trans Erotics of Voice, Gender and Age
Francesca Royster

Monday, April 23, 2012
5:30 p.m. Reception
6:00 p.m. Lecture
DePaul Student Center, room 314
2250 N. Sheffield Avenue
Lincoln Park Campus, DePaul University
Chicago
Flyer Details

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE
One-day Conference
Marking the 200th Anniversary of the Publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos 1 and 2

Monday, April 30, 2012
Cortelyou Commons
2324 N Fremont
DePaul University
Lincoln Park Campus
Chicago

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage conference commemorates the 200th anniversary of the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812.

The one-day conference at Cortelyou Commons will include a keynote address by Christine Kenyon Jones, of University of London, and Peter Graham, of Virginia Tech.

On Monday, April 30th, DePaul celebrates the 200th anniversary of the poem that made Byron famous, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Begun at Lawrence's hotel in Lisbon, Portugal and published in the spring of 1812 in London, the poem charts the 24-year-old poet's response to war-torn Europe, Napoleon's invasion of Spain and Portugal, Britain's response, the Convention of Cintra, and the struggle of Greece to live up to its heroic past. The poem helped launch what we now refer to as the "Byronic hero" and influenced paintings by Turner and music by Berlioz, as well as numerous British, Russian, and French writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Lamartine.

Peter W. Graham (Virginia Tech), author of Don Juan and Regency England (winner of the Elma Dangerfield prize in Byron Studies)  will speak on the Byronic hero in Childe Harold and the character of Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice at 10:00 a.m., and Christine Kenyon Jones (King's College, London) will address Byron's treatment of animals in Cantos I and II at 3:00 p.m. (drawing on her book Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing [Ashgate, 2001]).  The conference also features presentations by talented graduate students from as close as our own doorstep to as far away as Greece; Jennifer Finstrom of DePaul's M.A. in English program will address the topic of James Thomson's The Castle of Indolence and its influence on Byron's poem at 12:20 p.m.

Student and classes are welcome! If you would like to bring your class or send students for any part of the day, we are happy to provide a sign-in sheet. Contact Alecia Person (aperson@depaul.edu; 773-325-4580).

Cosponsors: University Honors Program and the Department of English

Flyer details

Full program details

A quick review of the presentation times is below.

Program Agenda:

9:15-9:45 Arrival and coffee

9:45-10:00 Recitation from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

10-11:15 Opening keynote and Q&A
Peter W. Graham, Virginia Tech Childe Harold and Pride and Prejudice

12:00-12:20 Lizzy Pournara, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Text of Bliss and Pleasure

12:20-12:40 Jennifer Finstrom, DePaul University
Beyond Spenserian Revision: Childe Harold’s Sojourn in The Castle of Indolence

12:40-1:00 Tom Minogue, Virginia Tech
Stones, Bones, and Spoils: Examining John Murray’s Correspondence Concerning Childe Harold
1:00-1:15 Q&A

1:15-2:05 Visit to Special Collections, 314 Richardson Library, 2350 N. Kenmore Ave.

2:05-2:25 F. Joseph Baerenz, Virginia Tech
Byron, Celebrity, and Mobility: Unmasking Childe Harold

2:25-2:45 Sein Oh, University of Illinois at Chicago
The Rise of the Byronic Narrator in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
2:45-3:00 Q&A

3:00-4:15 Afternoon keynote and Q&A
Christine Kenyon Jones, King’s College, London
The Elephant in the Room: Byron, Bullfighting and Other Animals

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FALL QUARTER 2011

2011-2012 FACULTY FELLOWS PROGRAM

The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting
Rachel Shteir

Monday, September 26, 2011
5:30 Reception; 6:00 pm Reading and Discussion
Cortelyou Commons
2324 N. Fremont St.
DePaul University
Lincoln Park Campus
Flyer details

11-12 SPEAKERS SERIES

The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger

Wednesday, October 12, 2011
6:00 pm Lecture and Discussion
Schmitt Academic Center, rm. 254
2320 N. Kenmore Avenue
DePaul University
Lincoln Park Campus
Flyer details

2011-2012 SERIES: LITERATURE AND MUSIC

Black Violet (Act I) 
Fifth House Ensemble

October 4, 2011
7:00-8:30 p.m.
Cortelyou Commons
2324 N. Freemont Street
Chicago, Illinois
Flyer details

The DePaul Humanities Center cordially invites the DePaul community and the community at large to see Chicago's acclaimed Fifth House Ensemble performance of Black Violet (Act 1), an original story of the Black Plague told through classical music, with images by graphic novelist Ezra Clayton Daniels.

Black Violet takes place in the year 1665, amidst one of the most terrifying passages in London's history. The last major outbreak of Plague is decimating the populace. In an act of superstitious desperation, the Lord Mayor declares the city's Black Cats at fault. When her owner leaves home to care for the sick, a black housecat named Violet is forced to venture into the streets for the first time in her life. She is soon taken in by a mysterious white rat whose true intentions may not be entirely benign.  View the trailer
 
Fifth House Ensemble is a versatile and dynamic group praised by the New York Times for its "conviction, authority, and finesse." Having pioneered the art of narrative chamber music with its signature series Black Violet and The Weaver's Tales, Fifth House's innovative programs engage audiences through their connective programming and unexpected performance venues. Complete information is available at the Fifth House Ensemble's website:
 
Having established itself as a regular on the Chicago chamber music scene, Fifth House has performed on some of the city's most well-regarded series and venues including the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, Mostly Music Series, Waukegan Chamber Music Society, Pritzker Pavilion, Byron Colby Barn, PianoForte Chicago, Live from the Morse/WFMT, WFMT Impromptu, Sunday Salon Series at the Chicago Cultural Center and Rush Hour Concerts at St. James.
 
Fifth House Ensemble is defined by its limitless imagination and energy, and an insatiable desire to bring chamber music to audiences of all types. Fifth House Ensemble harnesses the collaborative spirit of chamber music to create transformative cross-media performance experiences that bring together elements as diverse as storytelling, physical theatre, graphic novels, and fashion design. With humor and joy, 5HE breathes life into repertoire both established and emerging, equally at home on the most prestigious stages and unexpected venues including aquariums, train stations, and bars.

This event is free and open to the public. Parking is available at the Sheffield Parking Facility located at 2335 N. Sheffield and in the Clifton Parking Deck located at 2330 N. Clifton. Contact DePaul Parking Services (773-325-7275) for rates.

"Miles Davis: The Jazz Musician as Dandy"
John Szed

Monday, October 17, 2011
5:30 p.m. Reception; 6:30 p.m. Lecture
(Jazz Ensemble will play selections from Miles Davis between 5:30 and 6:15pm)
Cortelyou Commons
2323 N. Freemont St.
Chicago, Illinois
Flyer details

On October 17th, we welcome John Szwed, Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, Editor-in-Chief of JazzStudiesOnline, and author of the Grammy-award winning Dr. Jazz, which accompanied the 2005 release of Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax on Rounder Records.   The author of books profiling musicians and the music industry from Sun Ra to Alan Lomax, Szwed will discuss "Miles Davis: The Jazz Musician as Dandy," based in part on his 2002 biography, "So What: The Life of Miles Davis." 

Miles Davis' fame went well beyond music.  His attitude, clothing, stance, stagecraft, and speech all seem to have signaled a new type of musician.  Yet there was a historical basis for his apparent self-fashioning, a tradition that drew on distinct threads of African, African American, and European performance, as well as on a well-etched character type that emerged when these diverse ways of being emerged in the United States.  What we now characterize as cool had roots in African artistic and moral behavior, but also in Europe, in what Baudelaire called the dandy, which he described as a certain kind of bohemian, rooted in opposition and revolt, a personage with a "haughty, patrician attitude, aggressive even in its coldness." What surprises today is the way in which this characterization has persisted beyond Davis' life, and was passed on to even those to whom his name means very little.  Videos, recordings, and photos from various periods of Davis' career will be used to show the roots of his persona and his reworking of it over time, and to point out his influence beyond music to sports, fashion, advertising, even styles of business administration.

DO THE HUMANITIES MAKE US MORE HUMANE?
 
Just Looking: Art, Attentiveness and the Moral Imagination
James Soderholm

Wednesday, October 19, 2011
5:00 p.m.
DePaul Humanities Center
2347 North Racine Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
Flyer details

The lecture will sketch connections between our capacity for at once noticing the streaks of the tulip and the shrieks of the tortured. Drawing on music, painting,
philosophy and literature, Soderholm will offer twenty-seven brief meditations on 'the attentive' and 'the heartless' as a way of suggesting that our moral perceptions
may be sharpened by works of art in which seeing is represented as understanding.

James Soderholm is Professor of English at The King's School, Canterbury. He is currently completing a book of dialogues entitled "Platonic Occastions: Dialogues on Art, Literature and Culture" (with Richard Begam, University of Wisconsin) and working on an experimental book on Hamlet.

WINTER QUARTER 2012

2011-2012 SERIES: LITERATURE AND MUSIC

Salome in the Court of Queen Christina: Stradella, Wilde, and Strauss
Susan McClary

Thursday, January 19, 2012
5:30 pm Reception; 6:00 pm Lecture
Cortelyou Commons
2324 N Fremont Street
DePaul University
Lincoln Park Campus
Flyer details

On Thursday, January 19th, 2012 (6-7:30 p.m; Cortelyou Commons; there will also be a reception preceding at 5:30) noted author and cultural musicologist Susan McClary will discuss “Salome in the Court of Queen Christina: Stradella, Wilde, and Strauss.”
 

The lurid biblical story of John the Baptist, King Herod, and Herod’s precocious stepdaughter became an operatic hit in 1905 when Richard Strauss composed a musical setting of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play Salome. Dripping with fin-de-siècle decadence, the opera features hyperchromatic harmonies, orientalist dances, the fetishizing of a saint’s body, plus the thrills of incest and necrophilia. Wilde and Strauss punish their Salome by crushing her to death at the final curtain. But an earlier musical version of this character — la Figlia in Alessandro Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista (1675) — manages to triumph at the end, celebrating her seductive wiles even as Herod recoils in horror at what he has done. Not coincidentally Stradella composed for Queen Christina of Sweden, who took up residence in Rome after her infamous abdication. The sole female patron among the popes and cardinals who called the shots in this city, she fostered representations of powerful women and even broke prohibitions that usually guaranteed that castrati played all high-voiced roles. This talk will present performed excerpts from Stradella’s stunning score (edited from manuscript for the occasion). It will also consider the reasons why femmes fatales ruled the operatic stage in the seventeenth no less than in the late nineteenth century. Stradella’s Salome gives Strauss’s a run for her money.
 

Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western University.  She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality.  She is also author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form; Georges Bizet: Carmen; and Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, which won the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society in 2005. A collection of her most influential essays, Reading Music: Selected Essays by Susan McClary appeared in 2007. Two additional books — Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture and Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music — will appear in 2012.

11-12 SPEAKERS SERIES

The World Through the Eyes of Angels
Mahmoud Saeed
Visiting Fellow, DePaul Humanities Center 
with translator Allen Salter and Humanities Center director Jonathan Gross

Tuesday, January 31, 2012
5:30 pm Reception; 6:00 pm Reading/Discussion
DePaul Student Center, room 314
2250 N Sheffield Avenue
Lincoln Park Campus, DePaul University
Chicago
Flyer details

Interview and discussion of Saeed's literary life and work in Iraq and the U.S., including his influential novel, Saddam City and release of his new book The World Through the Eyes of Angels. 

Vision and Prayer
after the poem by Dylan Thomas
Kurt Westerberg
Chair, Department of Musicianship Studies and Composition, DePaul School of Music
11-12 DePaul Humanities Center Faculty Fellow

Friday, February 17, 2012
8:00 p.m.
DePaul Concert Hall
800 W Belden Avenue
Lincoln Park Campus
DePaul University - Chicago
Flyer details

This inaugural performance of Westerberg's newest work is presented by the DePaul School of Music's New Music DePaul series and also includes a performance of DePaul Professor Emeritus George Flynn's Songs of Destruction.

Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Martha Nussbaum
Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago

Thursday, March 8, 2012
5:30 p.m. Reception; 6:00 p.m. Lecture
Cortelyou Commons
2324 N Fremont Street
Lincoln Park Campus
DePaul University - Chicago
Flyer

Prominent scholar and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum will present: “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” based on her 2010 book by the same name.
 
In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Love's Knowledge, Poetic Justice, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach.