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Center for British Studies
“Crimes against Humanity”: The Armenian Genocide and the Great War
Michelle Tusan
Associate Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
22 September 2011
5 pm, 201 Moses Hall
Michelle Tusan joins Berkeley’s British Scholars Workshop on 22 September. Professor Tusan is a graduate of UC-Berkeley and holds an Associate Professorship at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She will discuss a chapter entitled: “ ‘Crimes against Humanity’: The Armenian Genocide and the Great War” from her upcoming book Smyrna’s Ashes: Britain, the Ottoman Empire and the Birth of the Middle East. The meeting will be followed by food and wine.
Paris is Worth a Massacre: Marlowe and the Death of Ramus
John Guillory
Silver Professor of English, New York University
23 September 2011
Noon to 2 pm, 223 Moses Hall
Professor John Guillory, Silver Professor of English, New York University. Professor Guillory’s teaching and research focus on two areas: early modern literature, and the histories of criticism, literary theory, and literary scholarship. In his period field, he is currently working on a book entitled, “Things of Heaven and Earth: Figures of Philosophy in English Renaissance Writing.” He will be discussing a pre-circulated on Christopher Marlowe,
*“Paris is Worth a Massacre: Marlowe and the Death of Ramus”
For a copy of the paper, please send a request the week of Sept. 19 to vkahn@berkeley.edu.
Britain, America and Asia: New Cooperation in the Pacific Century
Sir Nigel Sheinwald, British Ambassador to the U.S.
4:00 pm, 223 Moses Hall, September 29, 2011
For North Americans and Europeans alike, ensuring that a newly enriched and strengthened Asia becomes a partner in the international system, and not an adversary, will be one of the dominant themes of the new century. The EU and US need to build an effective transatlantic partnership on Asia-Pacific issues, a partnership that fits the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. In a globalised world the interests of European, North American, and Asian powers are bound together; the challenge is how to satisfy those interests and find ways to accommodate or overcome the inevitable differences in perspective between the established and the rising powers.
Sponsored by the Center for British Studies and the Institute of International Studies.
“Computing and the Practice of History”
Tim Hitchcock
Professor of History, University of Hertfordshire
3 October 2011
4:30 pm, 370 Dwinelle Hall
“Computing and the Practice of History” is a speaker and workshop series sponsored by the Department of History with support from Mellon Foundation and the Center for British Studies. It will explore the possibilities and challenges that come with the use of digital technology in historical and other humanities research. Our speakers will discuss how they use computing technology, and they will also be invited to address larger questions regarding the future of computing and humanities research. They have been selected to represent a variety of historical fields and a variety of technologies, so that our series might offer the broadest possible introduction to the ways that historians are using computing technology. Each speaker will also hold a workshop, which will introduce the technology or technologies most relevant to the speaker’s own research.
To speak at our inaugural event, we are glad to have Timothy Hitchcock, Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire. Professor Hitchcock has spent the last twenty years helping to create a ‘new history from below’ which puts the experiences and agency of the poor and of working people at the heart of our understanding of the history of eighteenth-century Britain. He has authored or edited ten books on the histories of poverty, gender and sexuality. He has helped to create an on-line and entirely searchable edition of the Old Bailey Sessions Proceedings, 1674 to 1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org).
This comprises some 120,000,000 words of text, and represents the largest body of material detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published. He has also helped to create a digital edition of approximately 240,000 pages of manuscript materials relating to the social policy provision in eighteenth-century London. This project, London Lives (www.londonlives.org), 1690-1800, is designed to facilitate the analysis of the inter-relationship between the demands of the poor and the users of social policy, and the evolution of modern institutions.
In addition to the lecture, there will be a workshop help on Tuesday, 4 October, from 9 am until noon. Space is limited for the workshop, so if you would like to attend it, please contact Scott Paul McGinnis at spmcginnis@berkeley.edu.
From Anger to Hedonism — and Back Again: Why Britain Can’t Escape the 1980s
John Harris
19 October 2011
Broadcaster and journalist John Harris is one of Britain’s leading rock critics and political commentators. He began his career with the rock magazines Melody Maker and the NME (New Music Express) and later became the editor of both Select and Q magazines, before returning to freelance music journalism and political commentary. He appears frequently on BBC radio and television as a reviewer and cultural critic, and contributes articles on political and musical matters to Mojo, Rolling Stone, The Independent ( London), The New Statesman, and The Times ( London). He writes a regular column for The Guardian ( London), for whose website he also produces a series of short documentaries on politics and society. He is the author of a best-selling account of rock and politics in the mid-1990s, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair, and the Demise of English Rock (2003), a powerful and funny study of the British political landscape as the Labour government prepared to run for its unpopular third term, Now Who Do We Vote For? (2004), and a monograph on the Pink Floyd album, The Dark Side of the Moon (2005).
Go East, Young West: An Artisan’s Exodus
Jane Kamensky
Harry S. Truman Professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University
24 October 2011
4 pm, 201 Moses Hall
Jane Kamensky, a historian of early America and the Atlantic world, is Harry S. Truman Professor at Brandeis University. Her talk explores the personal, colonial, and imperial pathways that brought artist Benjamin West from rural Pennsylvania to the British metropolis in the early 1760s. The essay is part of her ongoing research on a book entitled The American School: Art and Revolution in Georgian London.
Suicide and Theatre in the Cambridge of Charles I
David Cressy
Humanities Distinguished Professor of History and George III Professor of British History, Ohio State University
8 November 2011
Women’s Anthology Tour, A Reading of Irish Poetry
2 November 2011
6 pm, Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler)
In partnership with Culture Ireland, Wake Forest University Press will present a national tour of three Irish poets in autumn 2011. The tour will coincide with WFUP’s publication of the revised, second edition of the poetry anthology, The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry from 1967. The nation-wide tour will feature poet’s Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, winner of the prestigious 2010 Griffin International Poetry Prize for The Sun-fish; esteemed Irish poet, writer and critic Caitríona O’Reilly; and Leontia Flynn, awarded the 2008 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for Drives.
Inarticulacy: An Interdisciplinary Early Modern Conference
12-13 November 2011
When Cordelia responds to Lear with “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth” she both does and does not follow her own resolution to “Love, and be silent.” Like Hamlet before her, Cordelia has “that within which passeth show,” however, as a character on the stage, she is bound by literary convention to speak. Yet broader conventions, perhaps even necessity, compel human expression to manifest in human voice. As some philosophers have argued, to see and to be seen is not the only activity that provides the objective reality to subjective experience, but also to hear and to be heard. But what happens when words do not seem to suffice? And how can a scholarship dependent on reconstructed ‘presence’ interpret such absences, silences, and imprecisions in literary texts, the historical record, and visual media?
This conference will bring together ten panels of faculty and graduate students to explore such moments at the intersection of speech, silence, and wordless expression in the Early Modern period. The conference will unite a community of Early Modern scholars from across the country, including faculty and graduate students from UC Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Stanford, UC Riverside, Vanderbilt, Fordham, Cornell, Duke, and Northwestern.
Written on the Body: Remembering the 1980s Irish Prison Hunger Strikes
Emilie Pine, 2011 Fulbright Irish Scholar, visiting professor, Dept. of English, UC Berkeley.
In 1981 ten republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the Maze
prison in Northern Ireland, protesting for the right to political status.
Led by Bobby Sands, the hunger strikers were following in a tradition of
using the body as a weapon, and their emaciated bodies have become symbolic of the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. Following the end
of the strike, most of the prisoners’ demands were met, while the strike
also had the effect of pushing Sinn Féin into electoral politics. The
strike has thus had a profound effect on the politics of Northern Ireland,
but on the 30th anniversary of the strikes, how has culture – Irish,
British, Northern Irish – remembered the strikers? This lecture will
address the cultural legacy of the 1980 & 1981 hunger strikes, as a way of
considering how remembrance culture responds to trauma.
Emilie Pine is the 2011 Fulbright Irish Scholar, and a visiting professor
at the Department of English, Berkeley. She recently published "The
Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish
Culture" (Palgrave 2010). Pine has published widely on Irish memory culture,
theatre and film, and is the Assistant Editor of the Irish University
Review. She is currently writing a cultural history of Ireland in the
1930s.
May 4, 2011, Wednesday, 4pm, Moses Hall 201
Past Spring Events 2011
IES Rapid Response Forum:
Why Britain? the Privatization of the University
A Discussion with James Vernon, Prof. of History, UC Berkeley
April 7, 2011, Thursday, 12 noon
NOTE ROOM CHANGE:
223 Moses Hall
A light lunch will be served.
Symposium: “Toleration and Literature in Renaissance England”
Speakers: Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard University) and Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge)
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Alexandra Walsham is a professor of Modern History at Cambridge and isalso a Fellow of Trinity College. She has been a Fellow of the RoyalHistorical Society since 1999 and was elected a Fellow of the BritishAcademy in 2009. She is General Editor of the Past and Present Book Series and Past and Present Supplements (OUP) and a Series Editor of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (CUP). She has published extensively on a range of themes, including post-Reformation Roman Catholicism; religious tolerance and intolerance between 1500 and 1700; providence, miracles and the supernatural in post-Reformation society and culture; the history of the book, the advent of printing, and the interconnections between oral, visual and written culture; religion and the landscape. She is currently beginning a new project entitled ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England c. 1500-1700’.
Co-sponsored with the English Dept.
April 11, 2011, Monday, 1-5 pm,
315 Wheeler Hall, Maude Fife Room
Reception to follow in English Dept. Lounge
A Forum on the Novel
Plenary Speaker:
Sandra MacPherson (Ohio State University, English)
12:00 pm
Opening Remarks
Dorothy Hale (UC Berkeley, English)
12:30 pm
First Roundtable
“Character and the Novel”
Karen Leibowitz (UC Berkeley, English)
Nicholas Paige (UC Berkeley, French)
Kent Puckett (UC Berkeley, English)
2:30 pm
Second Roundtable
“Irony and the Novel”
Andrew Plaks (Princeton University, East Asian Studies and ComparativeLiterature)
Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley, English)
Catherine Gallagher (UC Berkeley, English)
5:00 pm
Plenary Address
“The Shape of Form”
Sandra MacPherson (Ohio State University, English)
Reception to follow in 330 Wheeler.
Co-sponsored by the English Dept.
March 11, 2011, Friday,
315 Wheeler Hall (Maude Fife Room)
CANCELLED
Re-Dedications: Shakespeare and the Theater of Hospitality
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Prof. of English, UC Irvine
Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with a joint appointment in Education and is also director of UCI’s Program in Jewish Studies. Her most recent scholarly books are Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago, 2011) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago Press, 2005). She is also author of Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996) and co-author with Kenneth Reinhard of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell, 1992).
Her newest project is entitled "Shakespeare by Design: Objects, Affordances, and Environments." The book aims to use the visual, cognitive, and phenomenological resources of design theory to disclose the many points of creative contact between formal and vernacular acts of design on Shakespeare’s stage. The emphasis will fall on the life of objects (developed via affordance, user, and interobjectivity studies), the design of space (supported by excurses into architecture and urbanism), the management of time (supplemented by phenomenology and political theology), and housekeeping and hospitality (filled out via vernacular design discourses from the Renaissance to the present). The book will supplement discourses developed within the disciplines of design with more broadly theoretical writings on biopower in order to probe the design/life interface in both its Renaissance and its contemporary formations.
Reception to follow in English Faculty Lounge.
Co-sponsored by the English Dept.
March 4, 2011, Friday, 3 pm-5 pm, 300 Wheeler
A Matter of Honour: Britain, the 'Behzti' Affair, and the Question of Multiculturalism
Priyamvada Gopal, Lecturer, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Gopal will explore the controversy surrounding Gurpreet Khaur Bhatti's 2004 play Behzti, which sparked heated protest for its depiction of rape, abuse, and murder in a Sikh gurdwara in Britain. Her lecture uses this episode to interrogate contemporary truisms about feminism, state multiculturalism, and artistic freedom.
Priyamvada Gopal (Ph.D. English, Cornell) is a lecturer in the Faculty of
English at Cambridge University. She is the author of two widely praised
books: "Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation, and the Transition to
Independence" (Routledge, 2005) and "The Indian English Novel: Nation,
History, and Narration" (Oxford, 2009). She has
published numerous scholarly articles on colonial and post-colonial
literatures (in English and Hindi/Urdu), film, contemporary feminism, and
Marxist and postcolonial theory. She is also a well-known commentator in
radio, television, and print media in both Britain and India.
Co-sponsored by the English Dept. and the Center for South Asian Studies
February 17, 2011, Thursday, 5:30 pm-7:30 pm, Stephens Hall 10 (CSAS Conference Room)
The Afterlife of Empire
Jordanna Bailkin, Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Washington
Bailkin will be giving a workshop on her current book project, The Afterlife of Empire, which is forthcoming in the new Berkeley Series in British Studies from the University of California Press. The workshop will include the introduction, plus the first chapter, which is titled "The Birth of the Migrant: Pathology and Postwar Mobility."
Jordanna Bailkin is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Washington, where she currently holds the Costigan Professorship in European History. She is the author of _The Culture of Property_ (Chicago, 2004), and numerous articles on topics ranging from tattooing and murder in colonial South and Southeast Asia to the deportation of Irish and West Indian citizens from 1950s and 1960s Britain. Her recent article, "The Postcolonial Family? West African Children, Private Fostering, and the British State," which was published in the Journal of Modern History in 2009, won the 2010 Walter D. Love Article Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies.
(Please email ctrbs@berkeley.edu for a copy of the paper.)
January 28, 2011, Friday, 2 pm-5:30 pm, Moses Hall 201
The Levellers and Modern Democracy: The Politics of Necessity and the Language of Consent
Alan Houston, Prof. of Political Science and Provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College, UC San Diego
The Levellers were the first modern political movement organized around the ideas of popular sovereignty, representative government within a nation-state, and a written constitution intended to protect the rights of citizens. These ideas have played a momentous role in modern liberal and democratic theory. A complete examination of them is the subject of a book Houston is currently writing. In this paper he focuses on one crucial aspect of Leveller thought: the way it linked the politics of necessity and the language of consent. Drawing on an intellectual framework first used by Parliament in 1642, the Levellers argued that the legitimacy of a political order was both procedural and substantive, having to do with the identity of the actors and the nature of the actions performed. England’s survival was at stake; modern democracy originated in the politics of necessity.Alan Houston is Professor of Political Science and Provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College at UC San Diego. He is the author and editor of four books in the history of political thought: Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (1991); A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, edited with Steve Pincus (2001); Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue (2004); and Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (2008). He is currently writing a book on the Levellers.
Co-sponsored by the Political Science Dept.
February 10, Thursday, 4 pm, Moses Hall 201
Interpreting UK Foreign Policy: Traditions and Dilemmas Conference
December 3, Friday, 9am-5 pm, Moses Hall 223
This workshop will explore UK foreign policy with particular emphasis on the period since 1979. The papers examine the broader historical background to the foreign policies of New Labour and the newly-formed coalition government. They address diverse topics such as:
*Ruling narratives: What elite beliefs informed various foreign policies? How and why did New Labour alter British or socialist traditions of foreign policy? Was there an alternative Conservative tradition and, if so, how did it change during this time? Do the Whitehall mandarins have their own traditions, and if so, how did they influence foreign policy making?
*Rationalities: What forms of expertise, particularly social science, influenced policy making? Did new traditions of network analysis genuinely inspire a more joined-up approach to aid? Would a conservative government press policies more indebted to neoclassical economics? Have various traditions of international relations scholarship had any impact on foreign policy in the UK?
*Resistance: Did the beliefs and actions of other policy actors thwart elite policies? Did Whitehall mandarins draw on old traditions to resist new rationalities? Was the delivery of some policies dependent on civil society (eg. Aid groups) with their own beliefs and traditions? Did the press or citizens defend alternative ideas based on different traditions, and, if so, how did that effect government policy?
* Dilemmas: What were the main dilemmas foreign policy makers faced? How did different traditions influence the ways people saw and responded to dilemmas?
Co-sponsored by the Political Science Dept. and the Centre for the Study of International Governance, Loughborough University (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/eu/CSIG/)
Early Modern Britain at the University of California: Exploring Political Culture
This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from throughout the University of California system to explore an area of common interest for much of the British Studies community on the West Coast: “political culture” in Britain from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. This was a particularly complex period when a public mass politics first developed despite, or perhaps through, the hierarchical structures of the monarchical state, and the recent work of historians, literary critics, and political scientists all converge upon the meanings and parameters of this epochal develo pment. The conference features speakers from nine of the ten UC schools and from departments of History, Rhetoric, English, and Political Science, including both faculty and graduate student participants. Our goals are to explore the issue of early modern political culture, to get to know each other better as a community of scholars with common interests, and to ask whether we have a peculiarly “Californian” approach to our common subject.
Please RSVP to ctrbs@berkeley.edu.
October 29 & 30th, Faculty Club
Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation
PROGRAM:
Friday, October 29th
Heyns Room, Faculty Club
9am-10am: Coffee & Tea Reception
Session 1: The Social (10am-12noon)
Susan Amussen, UC Merced
Fran Dolan, UC Davis
David Landreth, UC Berkeley
12 pm-1:30 pm: Lunch
Session 2: News and the Public (1:30 pm-3 pm)
Sears McGee, UC Santa Barbara
Debora Shuger, UCLA
Tom Cogswell, UC Riverside
Coffee & Tea Break (3 pm-3:30 pm)
Session 3: Boundaries (3:30 pm-5 pm)
Patricia Fumerton, UC Santa Barbara
Buchanan Sharp, UC Santa Cruz
Norma Landau, UC Davis
Saturday, October 30th
Seaborg Room, Faculty Club
9am-10am: Coffee, Tea & Pastries
Session 4: Theory and Practice (10am-12noon)
Alan Houston, UC San Diego
Robert Harkins, UC Berkeley
Eric Nebeker, UC Santa Barbara
12-1:30 pm: Lunch
Session 5: Genres (1:30 pm-3:30 pm)
Barbara Shapiro, UC Berkeley
Kelly Feinstein-Johnson, UC Santa Cruz
Nathan Perry, UC Santa Barbara
3:30 pm-4 pm: Closing Remarks
Early Modern Colloquium: Rayna Kalas and Valerie Forman with precirculated papers
Valerie Forman, Associate Professor, Gallatin School, New York University, “Neoliberalism in the Seventeenth Century: Political Economy from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to Behn's Oroonoko."
Rayna Kalas, Associate Professor of English, Cornell University: "Framers and Tyrants in Early Modern Political Literature"
Papers will be posted on the Comparative Literature website. You may also contact vkahn@berkeley.edu for the papers. Sponsored by the Center for British Studies and the
October 28th, Thursday, 5 pm, Moses 201
Co-sponsored by the Katherine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English
Patriot Royalism: The Stuart Monarchy in American Political Thought, 1769-1775
Eric Nelson, Professor of Government, Harvard University
This essay makes the case that American patriots of the early 1770s became the last Atlantic defenders of the early Stuart monarchs. Following the imposition of the Townshend duties, patriots jettisoned their previous insistence that Parliament was sovereign over the colonies but simply lacked authority to impose internal taxes, and instead adopted what scholars have called the “dominion theory.” America, on this account, was “outside of the realm” of Great Britain and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of Parliament.
What connected the American colonies to the imperial center was simply the person of the King, who served the same constitutional role in each part of his dominions, and who had granted charters to the various colonizing companies by his grace and at his pleasure. The King’s prerogative crossed the ocean; Parliament’s authority remained at home. This was an extraordinary position, but it was not without precedent. The argument that America was “outside of the realm” and therefore to be governed by prerogative had famously been made once before in English constitutional history—by the Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, in their acrimonious disputes with Parliament over colonial affairs in the 1620s.
This essay demonstrates that most patriot writers were fully aware of the provenance of their new constitutional position and enthusiastically embraced its ideological implications. In the process, they developed a radical, revisionist account of seventeenth-century English history. A proper reckoning with the story of Patriot Royalism should allow us to appreciate the true drama of the republican turn in 1776, as well as to understand the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism.
Eric Nelson is Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of political thought in early-modern Europe and America, and on the implications of that history for debates in contemporary political theory. Particular interests include the history of republican political theory, the reception of classical political thought in early-modern Europe, theories of property, and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
Nelson is the author of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard/Belknap, 2010) and The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as editor of Hobbes's translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2008). His essays have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals and edited volumes. Nelson received his AB summa cum laude from Harvard University (1999) and his PhD from The University of Cambridge (2002). He has also been a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a British Marshall Scholar.
November 12, Friday, 4pm, Women's Faculty Club Lounge
Co-sponsored by the Political Science Department
