Taft Lecture, Poetry: Arturo Gutierrez Plaza

Arturo Gutiérrez-Plaza

Bilingual poetry reading

Poet, essayist, and professor Arturo Gutiérrez-Plaza was born in Caracas in 1962. He earned a MA in Contemporary Latin American Literature from the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela in 1991 and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from UC in 2009. Gutiérrez-Plaza was a 1997 fellow at the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa and director of the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies, Venezuela from 1995 to 2000. His work has earned the 1995 Third Biennial Mariano Picón Salas Poetry Prize, the 1999 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Spanish-American Poetry Prize, and the Prize of the Foundation for Urban Culture, Venezuela in 2009. His publications include scholarly monographs, anthologies, essay collections, and the poetry collections Al margen de las hojas (1991), Principios de contabilidad (2000), and Pasado en limpio (2006). Gutiérrez-Plaza currently serves as Professor of Language and Literature at the Universidad Simón Bolívar.

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Taft Lecture, Political Science: Dr David Baker

Thursday, May 19, 2011

3:00 pm

Taft Research Center

David Baker

Warwick University, UK. (Retired)

Hon Fellow: Political Economy Research Centre, University of Sheffield, UK

Gives the talk: Markets Against Democracy – the Political Economy of the Tea Party Movement

An examination of the economic ideas of the Tea Party and their potentially destabilizing consequences for American pluralist democracy.

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Taft Lecture, Spanish: Dr Roberta Johnson

Roberta Johnson

Professor Emerita, University of Kansas

& Visiting Professor, UCLA

Gives the talk: Spanish Feminist Thought and the Contemporary Spanish novel.

The feminist movement in Spain has had a long history of allying itself with prose fiction. The lecture provides historical precedents for this phenomenon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before concentrating on the Franco era (1939-1975) when other forms of feminism were forbidden. More recent developments in Spanish feminist thought will be explored in novels written from 1975 to the present.

Date of the lecture: May 18, 2011

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2010-11 Taft Annual Symposium Keynote Event: Dialog Michael Hardt - Raj Patel

"The Commons: What It Is, How to Reclaim It" A Dialogue and Debate between
Michael Hardt (Duke University) and Raj Patel (UC-Berkeley)

Date: May 12, 2011

Who owns the earth's riches? Radical notions of the Commons suggest that our shared inheritance should be held in common, rather than commodified. In what is sure to be a thought-provoking and timely discussion, theorists Michael Hardt and Raj Patel come together to debate ideas of the Commons.

Introduction by Adrian Parr, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and
Sexuality Studies (A&S) and Urban Design (DAAP).

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Taft Lecture, Spanish: Dr Jose Quiroga

Dr. José Quiroga
Professor of Spanish, Emory University
Keynote Speaker, 31st Annual Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures

Givs the talk: Language Games

Poetry turns language into a spectacle—it twists and bends and forces language to speak of itself while also speaking about something else: reality or unreality, oppression or freedom, social conditions or inner spaces. In Latin America,
poetry has always played with and recombined languages. What forms of temporality does this create, and how does it render legible our distinct ways of being in the world?

May 5, 2011

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Taft Lecture, Spanish: Jose Prats Sariol

José Prats Sariol

Gives the talk: Baroque times in Latin America: José Lezama Lima y el Curso Délfico

April 29, 2011

Literary critic, novelist , essay writer and university professor, José Prats Sariol (La Habana, 1946) has published the novels Mariel (1997, 1999), Guanago Gay (2001), and the essays Estudios sobre poesía cubana (1988), Criticar al Crítico (1983), Fabelo (1994) y No leas poesía ( 2007). Prats Sariol was part of the group of critics that prepared the final edition of Paradiso, by José Lezama Lima, for the UNESCO in 1988, and has offered conferences in universities and cultural centers of Austria, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Mexico, Venezuela and the United States.

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Taft Lecture, English: Dr Sue J. Kim

Sue J. Kim
Associate Professor of English
University of Alabama at Birmingham

April 21, 2011

Gives the talk: 'This Game is Rigged, Man': Cognition, Race, & the Politics
of Anger in 'The Wire'

Sue J. Kim is the author of Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (2009). Her current project, On Anger, seeks to bring together insights into political anger developed in the fields of ethnic, postcolonial, and women's studies with recent work on emotion in cognitive studies and narrative theory.

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Taft Lecture, History: Dr Leo Lucassen

Leo Lucassen

Institute for History, Leiden University

Gives the talk: "Yet Another Great Divergence? Moving to the City Since the Late

18th Century, A Global Perspective"

Thursday, April 14, 2011

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Taft Lecture, Anthropology: Dr. Brigitte Demes

Dr. Brigitte Demes
Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University

Gives the talk: Facultative bipedalism in primates: Understanding the evolution of human gait

Abstract: Bipedal posture and locomotion are the earliest features that distinguish fossil hominids from their quadrupedal primate ancestors. South American capuchin monkeys, versed in both of these gait modalities, offer the opportunity to study what gait a quadrupedal primate adopts when it gets up on its hind legs. I have studied the mechanics of capuchin bipedalism in our primate gait laboratory and found that they use a bent-hip, bent-kneed running gait. The facultative bipedalism of other non-human primates, including our closest relative the chimpanzee, is also unlike the habitual bipedalism of humans. Based on these findings and anatomical constraints I conclude that the origin of human habitual bipedalism likely started as a bent-hip, bent-kneed gait. Speed would have been significantly impaired compared to quadrupedal limits, and the evolution of this gait was probably also not motivated by increasing locomotor efficiency.

Date of the talk: Monday, April 4, 2011

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Taft Lecture, History: Michael O'Malley

Taft Lecture, History: Michael O'Malley, George Mason University

Lecture: Compensated Emancipation: Why Does It Fail?

Date of the lecture: Tuesday, March 8, 2011

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Taft Lecture, Sociology: Dr. Mary Pattillo

Dr. Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology, and African American Studies at Northwestern University is the author of the books "Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class" and "Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City", both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Lecture: Race, Poverty, and the Rise of Choice Policies

Date of the Lecure: Friday, March 4, 2011

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Taft Lecture, History. Dr Matthew Gordon.

Dr. Matthew Gordon, Miami University
Gives the Talk: Singers and Soldiers: Slavery in Early Abbasid Society

Brief Abstract: Individuals of slave descent led significant households in Baghdad and Samarra, the capitals of the Abbasid caliphate, the second great empire of the Muslim world. Elite singers (qiyan), properly considered courtesans, and officers (quwwad), men of Turkish/Inner Asian descent serving as commanders of the Abbasid caliphate's slave military, played prominent roles in society and politics. Both groups achieved significant social mobility and the established extensive, independent households.

Date of the Talk: Feb 22, 2011

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Urban Humanities Series Lectures: Dr Stan Corkin

Urban Humanities Lecture Series
Stan Corkin, professor in the English and cpmparative literature department at the University of Cincinnati

Gives the Talk:

"Representing the Post-industrial: HBO's The wire and the Discrete Spaces of Baltimore"

Date of the lecture: December 2, 2010

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