The Syracuse University Humanities Center (HC), housed in The College of Arts and Sciences, celebrates its fifth anniversary by presenting its most ambitious spring symposia to date. Events include the HC Faculty Fellow Symposia, the HC Dissertation Fellow Symposia, the Humanities Faculty Fellow Lecture Series, the HC Co-Sponsored Lectures, the CNY Humanities Corridor Symposia, and a special screening of and panel discussion about a classic documentary concerning the Nuremberg Trials.

All events are free and open to the public, but some require advance registration. For more information or to register, contact Karen Ortega, HC program coordinator, at 315-443-5708 or kmortega@syr.edu.

Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and founding director of The SU Humanities Center, says the events are designed to showcase the scholarship of the HC’s resident Dissertation and Faculty fellows. “HC fellows have the unique opportunity to bring their research into conversation with students and faculty from across campus, while engaging with colleagues and outside experts,” he says. “These events nicely complement Syracuse Symposium, which we organize and present every fall for The College of Arts and Sciences.”

Lambert was also recently elected to the international advisory board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), which includes more than 20 humanities leaders from around the world. CHCI represents over 180 member organizations in 21 countries, including the recent additions of Japan, Singapore, and South Africa. 

The symposia schedule is as follows:

HC FACULTY FELLOW SYMPOSIA

“Sexuality, Psychoanalysis, Translation”
Faculty Fellow: Ken Frieden, professor and B.G. Rudolph Chair of Judaic Studies; and professor of religion; English; and languages, literatures, and linguistics (LLL) at SU

“The Marriage Plot: Sexuality and Secularization in Literary History”
Guest Speaker: Naomi Sheindel Seidman, the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union
Thursday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m.
Hall of Languages (500)

HC Mini-Seminar: “Translating Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalyzing Translation”
Featuring Frieden and Seidman
Friday, March 22, at 10 a.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)
Registration required: kmortega@syr.edu

Co-Sponsors: Departments of LLL and religion, as well as the Judaic Studies Program, all in The College of Arts and Sciences

“Cultural Politics in Brazil: The Case of Salvador da Bahia”
Faculty Fellow: Kwame Dixon, assistant professor of African American studies at SU
Guest Speakers: Ollie A. Johnson, associate professor of Africana studies at Wayne State University; and
John Burdick, professor and chair of anthropology at SU
Monday, April 15, at 9 a.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)

Co-Sponsors: Department of AAS in The College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Anthropology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs


HC DISSERTATION FELLOW SYMPOSIA

“Interrupting the Lucrece Effect: The Performance of Rape Stories on the Early Modern Stage”
Dissertation Fellow: Rinku Chatterjee, Ph.D. candidate in English at SU
Guest Speaker: Jean Howard, the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University
Monday, Feb. 18, at 7 p.m.
Heroy Auditorium, Heroy Geology Laboratory

HC Mini-Seminar: Chatterjee and Howard
Tuesday, Feb. 19, at 9:30 a.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)
Registration required: kmortega@syr.edu

Co-Sponsor: Department of English in The College of Arts and Sciences

“Revolution and the Crisis of Critique”
Dissertation Fellow: Sandeep Banerjee, Ph.D. candidate in English at SU
Guest Speaker: Keya Ganguly, associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota
Monday, April 22, at 5 p.m.
Peter Graham Scholarly Commons (114), Bird Library

HC Mini-Seminar: Banerjee and Ganguly
Tuesday, April 23, at 10 a.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)

Co-Sponsors: Department of English in The College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History in the Maxwell School, and South Asia Center in the Maxwell School’s Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs


HUMANITIES FACULTY FELLOW LECTURE SERIES

“Freedom’s Body: The Militarized Grounds of People’s Health Activism in Los Angeles”
Faculty Fellow: Jenna Loyd, departments of geography and anthropology at SU
Respondent: Robin Riley, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at SU
Tuesday, March 5, at 4 p.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)

“A Poetry Reading by Jesse Nissim”
Faculty Fellow: Jesse Nissim, Department of English at SU
Respondent: Patrick Williams, associate librarian at SU
Thursday, April 4, at 6 p.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)

“Transgenerational Trauma, Phantom Emotion”
Faculty Fellow: Meera Lee, affiliated faculty member of Asian/Asian American studies at SU
Respondent: Silvio Torres-Saillant, professor of English and Latino-Latin American studies at SU
Tuesday, April 9, at 5 p.m.
Tolley Humanities Building (304)


HC CO-SPONSORED LECTURES

“Assessing the Historicity of the Trojan War: Excavations at Troy, 1988-2010”
Charles Brian Rose, professor of classical studies, the James B. Pritchard Professor of Archeology, and curator-in-charge of the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, March 7, at 5 p.m.
Watson Hall, Robert B. Menschel Media Center

Co-Sponsor: Syracuse Society of the Archeological Institute of America

“Conversing With the Dalai Lama: 25 Years of Dialogue With Science”
Arthur Zajonc, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Physics Emeritus at Amherst College and president of the Mind and Life Institute
Tuesday, March 26, at 5 p.m.
Gifford Auditorium, H.B. Crouse Hall

Presented in cooperation with The Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences and Humanities and with the Department of Physics in The College of Arts and Sciences

“Reimagining Student Writers in the Global U.S. Higher Education”
Paul Kei Matsuda, professor of English and director of Second Language Writing at Arizona State University
Thursday, April 4, at 3:30 p.m.
Hall of Languages (500)

HC Mini-Seminar: Matsuda
Friday, April 5, at 8 a.m.
Hall of Languages (500)

Co-Sponsors: The departments of LLL and women’s and gender studies, as well as The Writing Program, all in The College of Arts and Sciences; the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies in the College of Visual Performing Arts; the School of Education and Kreischer Lecture Fund; SU Abroad; and the Alpha Sigma chapter of the Phil Beta Delta International Honor Society