Category Archives: News

Tom Laqueur interviewed on Fresh Air

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j10535If you missed it today, you can still listen to Terry Gross’s interview of Tom Laqueur at Fresh Air at NPR.org. Gross talks with Laqueur, a member of Representations‘ editorial board since the journal’s founding in 1983, about his new book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, 2015).

Thomas Laqueur is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. His other books include Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

 

Representations’s Saba Mahmood on the Paris attacks

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Saba Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology and member of the Representations Editorial Board, will participate in a panel on the attacks that occurred in Paris on November 13. The event, part of the “Expert Lectures” series sponsored by the Institute for International Studies, will take place on Wednesday, December 2 from 5-7 p.m. in the Booth Auditorium at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

The panel, moderated by Tyler Stovall (Distinguished Professor of History and Dean of Humanities at UC Santa Cruz), will also include Hatem Bazian (Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley), Judith Butler (Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Bartolomeo Conti (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Jean-Pierre Filiu (Sciences Po, Paris), Christopher Kutz (UC Berkeley School of Law), and Soraya Tlatli (French Department, UC Berkeley).

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Breaking News! Yurchak Wins Russia’s Prosvetitel Prize

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Congratulations to Representations editorial board member Alexei Yurchak, whose Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation («Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось») has been awarded Russia’s prestigious 2015 Prosvetitel Prize. The English version of the book was published in 2006 and shortly thereafter won the Wayne Vucinic Book Award for best book of the year from the American Society for Eastern European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. The expanded version, rewritten by Yurchak in Russian and published last year, was one of four books nominated for the Prosvetitel Prize in the humanities.

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Yurchak accepts the Prosvetitel Prize in Moscow.

Yurchak’s much talked about “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty” appeared earlier this year in Representations 129.

Alexei Yurchak’s “Everything Was Forever …” Nominated for Russia’s Prosvetitel Prize

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Jurchak_coverCongratulations to Representations editorial board member Alexei Yurchak, whose Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation («Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось») has been short-listed for Russia’s prestigious 2015 Prosvetitel Prize. Published in Russian last year, the book was first published in English in 2006, and shortly thereafter won the Wayne Vucinic Book Award for best book of the year from the American Society for Eastern European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies.

Yurchak’s much talked about “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty” appeared earlier this year in Representations 129.

Representations’ Michael Lucey in conversation with Rita Felski

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Michael Lucey, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and member of the Representations editorial board, will participate in a conversation with Rita Felski, William R. Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and editor of New Literary History, on “Attachment Theory,” following Felski’s lecture on the topic.

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The event will take place on Thursday, November 19 at 5:30 p.m., in the Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler Hall) at UC Berkeley.

 

Felski will also participate in a colloquium the following day on her recent book, The Limits of Critique, which engages in ongoing debates about modes of reading in which Representations has been central (see Representations 108, “The Way We Read Now” [Fall 2009]). The colloquium will take place in 300 Wheeler Hall on Friday, November 20 from 12-2 p.m.

New Issue, Representations 132

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Number 132, Fall 2015 (Read on Highwire)

TIMOTHY HAMPTON
Absolutely Modern:
Dylan, Rimbaud, and Visionary Song

ANICIA TIMBERLAKE
Brecht for Children: Shaping the Ideal GDR Citizen
Through Opera Education

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——————————

SPECIAL FORUM: Quirk Historicism
Edited by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart

NICHOLAS MATHEW and MARY ANN SMART (free download)
Elephants in the Music Room: The Future of Quirk Historicism

JAMES Q. DAVIES
On Being Moved/Against Objectivity

EMILY I. DOLAN
Musicology in the Garden

ELLEN LOCKHART
Pygmalion and the Music of Mere Interest

AOIFE MONKS
Bad Art, Quirky Modernism

BENJAMIN PIEKUT
Pigeons

BENJAMIN WALTON
Quirk Shame

—————–

FIELD NOTES

RANDOLPH STARN   Touching the Intangible:
Toward an Alternative Genealogy of Intellectual Property

James Davies presents “Romantic Anatomies of Performance”

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Davies_book_Oct_chatJames Q. Davies, Associate Professor of Music Scholarship at UC Berkeley, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “Romantic Anatomies of Performance.” Part of the Berkeley Book Chats series sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the event will take place on Wednesday, October 14, from noon to 1pm in the Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall.

Davies’s essay, “On Being Moved/Against Objectivity,” is forthcoming in Representations 132. Part of a special forum on “Quirk Historicism,” the essay identifies the ‘‘soft modernist’’ provenance of recent scholarship through an account of musical rocks named and mythologized in the nineteenth century.

 

The Problematic Future of Higher Education

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rsEUva6TiKzV6x129r9ybVVwx8aFfHapHBRwdSFCQUMKWV9ISAvYxv0wB-emHlIzQqV7fogqDbtzIsr9Pca6YOwWndfWk7Yy7R5xov-8UlH4zJvHTCRu8i8ngfZdJPzvBbyp9biYnJ9U9A=s0-d-e1-ftThe Center for Public Scholarship at The New School for Social Research presents The Problematic Future of Higher Education, a discussion on the ways in which higher education is changing with the demand for outcome-based education, the shift to MOOCs, and the challenging financial landscape students and universities face. The panel discussants include David Bromwich (Sterling Professor of English, Yale University), Andrew Delbanco (Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies, Columbia University), Richard Kahlenberg (Senior Fellow, Century Foundation), and Marina Warner (Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London). The discussion will be moderated by Kenneth Prewitt (Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affair, Columbia University).

 

The free event will take place on October 13, from 6:15–8:15 pm, at The New School, 55 West 13th Street, New York, NY, in the Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, 2nd Floor.

 

A related discussion can be found in the Representations special issue, “The Humanities and the Crisis of The Public University” (116, Fall 2011).

 

 

Call for Proposals

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Representations-Townsend Center Collaborative Grant Competition

Starting in the 2015–2016 academic year, Representations will be collaborating with the Townsend Center for the Humanities to present an annual event—a lecture, colloquium, or symposium—to be held on the UC Berkeley campus.

The event will bring together a small number of people from UC Berkeley and beyond, around a focused theme. It is the hope of the sponsors that the events will lead to a special section in, or a special issue of, Representations and/or result in a volume in the Townsend Center’s Berkeley Forum in the Humanities book series.

Up to $5,000 is offered per proposal. Accepted proposals for Spring 2016 will be announced by November 20.

Call for Proposals

  1. Who may apply: All UCB faculty
  2. What to submit: A detailed proposal of up to 750 words, including names of proposed participants and a rough budget
  3. How to submit: Proposals may be sent via email to Representations: reps@berkeley.edu.
  4. Deadline: October 15

 

Representations’ Stephen Greenblatt on the Humanities

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0_GreenblattStephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and a member of the founding board of Representations, will present a lecture entitled “In the Cave: The Humanities and the Human Condition.” The lecture will take place at 5:00pm on Thursday, September 3 in 315 Wheeler Hall (Maude Fife Room).

One of the oddest features of the Humanities is their almost complete lack of progress. With technology, science, and medicine, we expect and indeed demand the latest, most advanced version; with the Humanities the latest is not necessarily the best, and the aging of work–that is, distance from the immediate circumstances of our lives–simply does not matter. How is that possible? In this lecture, Greenblatt will talk about the paintings in the cave de Chauvet, from 30,000 years ago, and then turn to Gilgamesh, Genesis, and the Iliad. What do these artifacts, among the earliest that survive, have to tell us about the ways that the Humanities make us human?