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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