Session 3

3:30–4:30 P.M.

World Travelers in the Early Modern World

The early modern period is a time of mobilization and displacement of people—soldiers, missionaries, slaves, merchants—on a massive and global scale. This talk will explore the life and writings of a few sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelers who set foot in five continents and tried to make sense of an increasingly globalizing world.

Miguel Martínez

Miguel Martínez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Iberia and colonial Latin America. He is the author of Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 

On Thin Ice: Language, Culture, and Climate in the Arctic

Climate change, and its immediate and long-term effects, is a major issue of our time. In the Circumpolar Arctic, climate change is proceeding at an accelerated rate and affects all aspects of life. This talk focuses on the impact of these changes on Arctic languages and cultures and demonstrates the links between them, and explores the relationship between cultural and linguistic maintenance on the one hand and sustainable human development on the other.

Lenore Grenoble

Lenore Grenoble is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Linguistics. She specializes in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages, and is currently conducting fieldwork on Evenki (Tungusic) in Siberia, Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, Inuit) in Greenland, and Wolof (Niger-Congo) in Senegal. Her research focuses on the study of contact linguistics and language shift, discourse and conversation analysis, deixis, and issues in the study of language endangerment, attrition, and revitalization.

The Archive of Absence: Speculative Film History and Early African American Cinema

While African Americans produced films starting around 1909, no prints or fragments survive prior to 1920. This cinematic absence—a lost decade—is a great challenge for Black visual historiography, but also offers an opportunity for a more flexible and imaginative reconstruction of Black filmmaking practices, something that a number of contemporary Black artists have taken advantage of. This talk considers how a speculative archive can be mobilized not only to give form to what’s absent but also to create the visual material anew. 

Allyson Nadia Field

Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Her research investigates race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is African American film, both silent-era and more contemporary filmmaking practices. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015).

“Vaccies Go Home!”: Evacuation, Psychoanalysis, and Fiction in World War II Britain

On September 1, 1939 the British government launched a program ominously codenamed Operation Pied Piper, whereby thousands of children were evacuated from the cities to the countryside. This operation brought class conflict into the foreground, laying bare the drastic inequalities of British society, but also provided the foundations for the development of child psychoanalysis. This talk examines the impact of the evacuation crisis on psychoanalytic theories of the child, comparing these to the depiction of children in wartime fiction.

Maud Ellmann

Maud Ellmann is Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her research and teaching interests focus on British and European modernism and literary theory, particularly psychoanalysis and feminism. She has published several books, the most recent of which is The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 

Is the Mind Real? The Place of Thought in the Natural World

That we think about things, that we remember past events, that we perceive the world around us, that we feel pain and other sensations, that we have emotions, that we formulate plans and strive to put them into action—these are among the most quotidian, undeniable realities of human life as we know it and experience it. And yet philosophers and scientists have long struggled to find a place for such "mental" phenomena within a conception of the world as natural and un-mysterious. Why has this been seen as such a difficult task? Is this challenge genuine, or is it illusory?

Jason Bridges

Jason Bridges is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, with interests in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of action, Wittgenstein’s later work, and political philosophy. He has authored numerous articles and co-edited The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Reflections on the Thought of Barry Stroud (Oxford University Press, 2011). 

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