èצӰ��

Monday, May 9 — Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall

9:30–11 am (Panel I)

Opening Remarks, Gabriella Safran (èצӰ��)

“The End of the Coverage Model—And What Comes After,” 

Roland Greene (èצӰ��)

“Euphemisms, Efficiencies, and Interdiscipline,” 

Karen Bassi (UC Santa Cruz)

“Some Futures of the Humanities,” Derek Collins (Univ of Michigan)

Coffee Break

11:30 am–12:30 pm (Panel II)

“Moving Around the Furniture: Restructuring the Humanities in 

Challenging Times,” Linda Hutcheon (Univ of Toronto)

“Starry Skies and Moral Laws: the Humanities in British Universities 

Today,” Regenia Gagnier (Univ of Exeter)

Lunch

2–3 pm   (Panel III)

“For a Practical Humanities,” Russell Berman (èצӰ��)

“Humanities and the Crisis,” Roddey Reid (UC San Diego)

PANELISTS:

Karen Bassi, University of California, Santa Cruz

Karen Bassi is Professor of Literature and Classics and Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her principal areas of research and teaching are Greek literature and historiography and visual and performance studies. Her most recent publication is “Making Prometheus Speak: Dialogue, Torture, and the Power of Secrets in Prometheus Bound.” In edd. Karen Bassi and Peter Euben, When Words Elide (Rowman and Littlefield 2010) 77-110. She is currently working on a book for the University of Chicago Press entitled Seeing the Past/Reading the Past:Visuality and Temporality in Greek Literature and History. The book explores the connections between the representation of physical or visible phenomena and the conceptualization of past time in Greek texts from Homer to Herodotus.

Russell Berman, èצӰ��

Russell A. Berman, the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at èצӰ��, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Berman specializes in the study of German literary history and cultural politics. He is a member of both the Department of German Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at èצӰ��. From 1992 through 2000 he served as director of the èצӰ�� Overseas Studies Program. He is currently director of the German Studies program at èצӰ�� as well as director of the Introduction to the Humanities Program. He is the author of numerous articles and books including Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998) and The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1986), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association (in 1987 and 2000, respectively). Hoover press published his book Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010) and Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (2004). His other books include Cultural Studies of Modern Germany: Representation and Nationhood (1993), Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (1989), and Between Fontane and Tucholsky: Literary Criticism and the Public Sphere in Wilhelmine Germany (1983). He has published numerous articles in Hoover Digest, most recently “The Psychology of Appeasement,” (Summer, 2004).

Derek Collins, University of Michigan

Derek Collins is Associate Dean for the Humanities in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and Professor of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classical Studies. He received his BA (Linguistics and Psychology) from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1987, his MA (Folklore and Mythology) also from UCLA in 1991, and his PhD (Comparative Literature) from Harvard University in 1997. Prior to joining the University of Michigan faculty in 1999, Collins taught for two years at the University of Texas at Austin. At Michigan, he is an award-winning teacher, and has received the LSA Excellence in Education Award in 2007 and the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award in 2004. He has been awarded fellowships by the Ford Foundation, the Institute for the Humanities at UM, and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. His research interests are in Greek poetry and its performance, and in Greek religion and the history of magic and witchcraft, on which together he has published three books and more than a dozen articles. His latest book is Magic in the Ancient Greek World (Blackwell, 2008). As a divisional dean at the University of Michigan, he has primary responsibility for 19 departments, centers and institutes, including presiding over promotions of faculty at all ranks; packaging all recruitments and retentions of faculty; and managing all academic affairs issues—including distributing College research awards, handling faculty grievances, personnel issues, FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, departmental and program reviews, curricular reviews that involve concentration or program changes, and faculty leave requests.

Regina Gagnier, University of Exeter

Professor Regenia Gagnier is a committed critical thinker who always historicizes. Her books have shaped the study of Victorian and modern culture with highly influential work on decadence, aesthetics and aestheticism, lifewriting and subjectivity, economics, individualism, and globalization. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000) traced the moment when aesthetics and economics shifted from substantive to formal models and production to consumption. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: on the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859–1920 (Palgrave, 2010) explores the relation of the individual to increasingly larger social units, from the dyad to the world citizen. Her current research is on the global circulation of the literatures of decadence and liberalization. Gagnier is Editor in Chief of Literature Compass (the leading online journal of the discipline as a whole, with 18 international sub-editors) and its Global Circulation Project; associate editor, Feminist Economics; associate editor, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities; editorial advisor to Women: A Cultural Review; and on the editorial boards of Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, Partial Answers, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19C, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Kritika Kultura, and RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net). Gagnier has won numerous awards and fellowships for teaching as well as research in North America, Britain, and Europe and reads widely for journals and academic presses. She has served on five MLA Division Executive Committees in the USA and the AHRC Research Panel and CCUE Executive in the UK as well as other national and international professional bodies. In 2006, she was made Honorary Centenary Fellow of the English Association and in 2008 elected to the Royal Society of Arts. She is the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Gagnier is a native Californian who took her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at the University of California at Berkeley. She was tenured and made full professor at èצӰ��, where she taught for fourteen years in English, Modern Thought and Literature, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Cultural Studies Group. In 1996, she moved to the UK and the University of Exeter, where she is Professor of English, Director of the Migrations Research Network, and Senior Fellow of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). From 2008–2010 she was appointed the Director of Exeter's Interdisciplinary Institute (EII).

Roland Greene, èצӰ��

Roland Greene, the Mark Pigott OBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at èצӰ��, is a scholar of early modern culture, especially the literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and of poetry and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present. He is the author and editor of several books, most recently Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, currently in press. He is the editor in chief of the forthcoming Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which brings together the work of poetry scholars in all languages and traditions around the world. At èצӰ�� Greene is the founder and co-chair of three research workshops: the èצӰ�� Poetics group (an intellectual home for specialists in poetics in all the literature departments as well as linguistics and the social sciences), Renaissances (a venue for early modernists), and the Transamerican Workshop (for faculty members and PhD students in the emerging field of hemispheric American literatures). In 2009 he founded Arcade: A Digital Salon for Literature, the Humanities, and the World . He served seven years as Head of èצӰ��'s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, concluding in 2010. Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, is a specialist in postmodern culture and critical theory (especially irony, parody and adaptation), on which she has published 9 books. She has also worked collaboratively in large research projects involving hundreds of scholars, including the multi-volumed Rethinking Literary History—Comparatively. She is guilty of having indulged in interdisciplinary work with Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Medicine, U of T, on the intersection of medical and cultural history, studied through the vehicle of opera. After three books on topics such as disease, death and the body, they are now working on one about the late style and last works of long-lived opera composers. In addition, she is also working on a (solo) book on the ethics, economics and politics of reviewing in the age of the 'customer reviewer'.

Roddey Reid, University of California, San Diego

Roddey Reid is Professor of French Studies and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego where he is also affiliated faculty of the Science Studies Program and the Critical Gender Studies Program. His teaching and research focus on the history of modern cultures and societies in the US, France, and Japan from the perspective of how citizenship and selfhood are shaped by particular cultural forms, governmental policies, medical and scientific knowledge, and social movements. He is author of Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750–1910 (èצӰ��, 1993), co-editor of Doing Science + Culture (Routledge, 2000), and author of Globalizing Tobacco Control: Anti-Smoking Campaigns in California, France, and Japan (Indiana University Press, 2005). Recently he has published articles in Canada, France, and the U.S. on public cultures of intimidation and bullying with a focus on the United States.

Gabriella Safran, èצӰ��

Gabriella Safran is Professor and Director of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Chair of the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at èצӰ��. She has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent book, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-Sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker. (info Currently, Safran is beginning to teach and write on folklore, and she is contemplating a project investigating on conference sponsors) nineteenth-century short Russian, Yiddish, and US fiction in the context of the history of listening. As the Chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Safran is increasingly interested in the reorganization of humanities departments and the implications of that for teaching, learning, and scholarship.