Public Events Archives | Page 10 of 13 | National Humanities Center

Public Events

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Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Color: Color Threads in Proust and Murasaki”

Literature, unlike the other arts, has no material content. The pictures are made on the mental retina. When we imagine a color, do we think of a piece of language that spells out the name of the color or does a physical (or quasi-physical) event take place in the brain? This lecture traces out the moments at which two great colorists, Marcel Proust and Lady Murasaki, summon color into being both in the worlds of their respective novels, and on the “mental retina” of the reader. Using contemporary neuroscience as well as classic experiments on the imagination from cognitive psychology, the lecture examines the phenomenon of color threads, the background colors against which our imagination carries out its acts of image-production, and the unexpected relationship between color and mortality.

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Maud Ellmann, “‘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 by Maud Ellmann examines the impact of the evacuation crisis on psychoanalytic theories of the child, comparing these to the depiction of children in wartime fiction.

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Alan Taylor, “Educating Citizens and Reforming Generations”

​In the wake of the American Revolution, political leaders insisted that their new republic could not survive without improved and more comprehensive public education meant to create better informed citizens. But the push for educational reform often ran afoul of local legislators and voters, who balked at the taxes needed to fund expanded systems of education. In his talk, historian Alan Taylor discusses this​ ​intriguing irony—that republican reliance on popular sovereignty complicated efforts by elites to improve voters through education.

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A Conversation with Carolina Public Humanities’ Rachel Jones Schaevitz

Rachel Jones Schaevitz is a filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on using media and the humanities to enact social change. She earned her doctorate in media and communications from Temple University, where her research explored how moving images are capable of transcending differences in language and culture. She currently teaches and works with Carolina Public Humanities, creating opportunities to share the work of humanists with the broader public. Join Rachel on September 28, 2017 for a discussion of her work as a filmmaker and media researcher. She appears as part of the Conversations with Scholars series presented by the Southwest Regional branch of the Durham County Library and the National Humanities Center.

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North Carolina: The New American Heartland

North Carolina: The New American Heartland is a multi-dimensional initiative—highlighted by a three-day gathering which took place on September 27–29, 2017—enlisting scholars, artists, journalists, educators, policy experts, activists, community leaders, and others to critically consider North Carolina’s role as a bellwether for the nation. Through the lenses of food, music, and storytelling, the conference provided a forum for examining the state’s complex and myriad cultural identities and for exploring how the arts and humanities can help us better understand and face our shared challenges.

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A Conversation with Professor Jocelyn Olcott

How do scholars become fascinated by their subjects and what is it like when they make a new discovery? How does the process of research, analysis, writing, and teaching change their perspectives of the world? Join Professor Jocelyn Olcott of Duke University on September 21, 2017 for a discussion of her new book and about her journey as a scholar of transnational women’s history. Olcott appears as a part of the Conversations with Scholars series presented by the Southwest Regional branch of the Durham County Library and the National Humanities Center.

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DataRescue RTP

Please join us June 10 & 11 for DataRescue RTP, an event organized by DataRescue Chapel Hill and the NHC. DataRescue RTP aims to preserve online government data related to housing and education programs. We are focusing on datasets identified as being at high risk for removal from online public access. While the Internet Archive has preserved copies of many government websites, it is unable to archive datasets. DataRescue events are a key piece in ensuring that these datasets are copied. The Internet Archive, DataRefuge and a consortium of research libraries hold these copies and keep them available for public access.

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Making Negro Literature: Literary Workspaces at the Margins of Print Culture

As part of her ongoing effort to chronicle African American literary culture at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Elizabeth McHenry has been focusing on African American bibliographies, which emerged as experimental knowledge structures that provided ways of mapping and making sense of an emerging and rapidly evolving canon of “Negro literature.” These bibliographies were not just “lists,” but exploratory documents, where black intellectuals thought critically and advanced arguments about the boundaries and contours of black literature and authorship.

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Nancy Wicker, “Vicious Vikings as Cultural Ambassadors”

Popular sources present the Vikings as ruthless warriors yet also take great pains to portray their decorated weapons, jewelry, clothing, houses, and ships—that is, their art. In this talk Nancy Wicker will discuss the patrons who sponsored that art, the artisans who made the objects, and the men and women who used the works, at home in Scandinavia as well as across the diaspora where Vikings raided, traded, and settled, from the North Atlantic to Russia and beyond.

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Matthew Morse Booker, “The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Oyster”

From the 1840s to 1910s, oysters flourished in the polluted estuaries of America's industrial cities. Their rise and collapse are equally astonishing. Today, oysters are once again on the menu. But what was once a staple of the urban working poor, grown within the city, has become a luxury, produced in rural places. The rise and fall of oysters is a microcosm of changes in food production and consumption in the modern era. It can teach us what people ate, where food was produced and how the city became a place solely for consumers.