Case Western Reserve University
Baker-Nord Center Events
Spring 2012
A Bedouin at the Window: Readings from "The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia"
Mary Helen Stefaniak
| Date: | 02-01-2012 |
| Time: | 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm |
| Location: | Wolstein Building Auditorium - 2103 Cornell Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
Author Mary Helen Stefaniak will read from and talk about her Anisfield-Wolf-award-winning novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W. W. Norton & Company). Most of the novel takes place in 1938-39, when a well-traveled new schoolteacher turns the little town of Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Spivey not only abandons the prescribed curriculum, providing a few dozen white children with a more worldly and inclusive education; she also reinvents the town's annual festival as a Baghdad Bazaar, complete with camels. But neither Miss Spivey nor the narrator, young Gladys Cailiff, her student and ardent fan, is the hero of the novel. That role belongs to the Cailiffs' 17-year-old African-American neighbor, Theo Boykin. Theo, who is known to all as the smartest person in Piedmont County, soon becomes Chief Engineer and creative genius behind the Baghdad Bazaar. He makes dangerous enemies in the process. Stefaniak will alternate readings from the novel with stories of the surprising research that led her to "discover" a real-life ancestor for her fictional hero in the person of Bilali Mahomet, a literate African Muslim enslaved first in the Bahamas and then on Sapelo Island, Georgia. Bilali Mahomet was famous in his lifetime for his intelligence, his Muslim faith, and his abilities as plantation overseer and leader of men.
Elsa Leichter's Second Chance: Interruptions and Continuities in a Refugee Social Worker's Transatlantic Career
Barbara Reiterer
| Date: | 02-08-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Room 320 a,b,c - 11235 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public. |
Barbara Reiterer, who holds a doctoral fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. and is a PhD candidate in the Program in History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, explores the life and work of Elsa Leichter (1905-1997), a Jewish refugee social worker from Vienna who came to the United States on the eve of World War II. This presentation is intended to inform our understanding of refugee resettlement and gender. Leichter received a degree in social work from Case Western Reserve University and went on to work for the Jewish Family Service in New York City, where she earned distinction in the field of family therapy. Starting in the 1970s, she traveled to Europe to give lectures and workshops, thus contributing to the transatlantic circulation of knowledge in the applied social sciences. This talk traces the complex, often difficult, but eventually very successful professional trajectory of an Austrian refugee social worker in the United States. Leichter's story informs the larger history of Austrian and American social work in the mid-twentieth century, and it deepens our understanding of the experiences of Jewish women exiles in the United States.
A New Future for the Past: The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
John Grabowski
| Date: | 02-09-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 206 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
With the publication of its first hardcopy edition in 1987, The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History opened a new era in the presentation of urban history. When it moved to the World Wide Web in 1998, it pioneered the concept of an on-line, vetted, urban history resource. Today the on-line ECH stands as one of the university’s most visible digital humanities projects. However, in the midst of the growing number of on-line wikis, blogs, and social networks, it is changing again to remain competitive as a popular, attractive, scholarly historical source. Editor John J. Grabowski will discuss the past, present, and future of the ECH at this Baker-Nord digital humanities program.
Film Screening and Discussion: Bill Cunningham New York
| Date: | 02-20-2012 |
| Time: | 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm |
| Location: | Wolstein Building Auditorium - 2103 Cornell Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
The focus of this award-winning documentary is on New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding photographer has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns "On the Street" and "Evening Hours." Cunningham's enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. The film is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace.
Organizing Justice: Forming the Preußischer Richterverein and Advocating for Judges
Kenneth F. Ledford
| Date: | 02-23-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 206 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
For years at the end of the 19th century, Prussian judges chafed at the higher pay and status granted to their colleagues in the general administrative bureaucracies, who had been their classmates while studying at the University. Ledford examines what were the social and cultural circumstances that in 1909 led those Prussian judges to defy the pressure from the Prussian Ministry of Justice, and to form a professional association that increasingly toward 1914 pressured the government to equalize pay and status for judicial and administrative officials. This episode of professional organization weaves together important aspects of the histories of the German state, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the cultural values of the German educated middle class in the final years of the German Empire.
The Digital Muse: Technology & The Classics
Paul Iversen, Andrea De Giorgi
| Date: | 03-01-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 206 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
De Giorgi will discuss how Classical archaeology, as with most sciences that have an interest in the spreading of human phenomena over space, has developed a way to harness GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Theoretically and methodologically confined to the observation of single sites and their settlement history, archaeology through GIS lenses has begun to articulate more refined questions about regions and districts in antiquity and how these were experienced and shaped by human agencies. A landscape in southwestern Anatolia is the case-study that this presentation brings into focus.
Iversen will talk about recent technologies he has used in to study the inscriptions on the Antikythera Mechanism, a bronze geared device from the 2nd or 1st century BCE that is the world’s oldest known analogue computer and one of the most important artifacts ever discovered for understanding ancient astronomy and engineering. The inscriptions are studied via images created using a method called Polynomial Textured Mapping (PTMs), as well as CT-scans taken by means of a technology called Micro-Focus X-rays, the latter of which produces 2-D images that are then reconstructed into 3-D images with astounding clarity by a vector graphics program.
The Double Life of Celebrity
Sharon Marcus
| Date: | 03-05-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 309 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
The power of celebrity is the power of contradiction and paradox. Celebrities are extraordinary and typical, trendy and transcendent, vulnerable and omnipotent; they can seem simultaneously masculine and feminine, straight and gay, and the greatest stars appeal across ethnic, religious, linguistic and national boundaries. In this lecture, Sharon Marcus, the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, explores the dual nature of celebrity by focusing on nineteenth-century actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), known for much of her lifetime as the most famous woman in the world.
The Hollywood Sign: How a Temporary Commercial Sign Became a Permanent International Icon
Leo Braudy
| Date: | 03-08-2012 |
| Time: | 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 309 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
Originally erected as a real estate advertisement in 1923, the Hollywood Sign only gradually became the most familiar representation of the movie industry. Ignored, mocked, destined for demolition, then celebrated and treasured, Braudy, University professor and Bing Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California, will discuss how its checkered history mirrors the development of Hollywood itself.
Gaming the World: How Sports in Europe and America Reflect the Global and the Local in Similar and Different Ways
Andrei Markovits
| Date: | 03-28-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 309 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
Markovits, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, will discuss how the culture of what he has come to call "hegemonic sports" — meaning those few ball-centered team sports that billions follow around the globe — arose in the 19th century, how it spread during that period best associated with what Markovits calls "the first globalization" and how this construct is in the process of persisting but also transforming in our current time that Markovits associates with the "second globalization". Following his argument delineated in his book Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2010) — co-authored with Lars Rensmann — Markovits will present this sports culture's immensely enlightening, inclusive, meritocratic and cosmopolitan aspects while at the same time producing some of the ugliest manifestations of counter-cosmopolitanism, racism sexism and other prejudices of the advanced industrial world.
Poetry in the Museum
Jorie Graham
| Date: | 04-01-2012 |
| Time: | 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm |
| Location: | Cleveland Museum of Art - 11150 East Boulevard |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
Pulitzer-prize winning poet Jorie Graham will share her work in the dramatic setting of the Reid Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art, co-sponsor of this event. Graham is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University and former Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. Following her reading and reflections, Graham will announce the winners of the Poetry in the Museum contest, which calls for a descriptive response to a work of art in the CMA collection. Contest winners will read their poems in proximity to described work of art. A book signing with Graham will conclude the event. Support provided by the Helen Buchman Sharnoff Endowed Fund for Poetry at Case Western Reserve University.
This event was rescheduled from the Fall semester.
Climate Catastrophes in the Solar System: Lessons for Earth
David Grinspoon
| Date: | 04-04-2012 |
| Time: | 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm |
| Location: | Wolstein Building Auditorium - 2103 Cornell Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public. |
Grinspoon, author, Curator of Astrobiology in the Department of Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and Adjunct Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Science at the University of Colorado will present an interplanetary perspective on climate change. What happened to the lost oceans of Venus and Mars? Grinspoon will discuss how studying the evolution of other planets contributes to understanding and predicting climate change on Earth. Along the way he'll lead us on a journey through the solar system—and deep time—discovering runaway greenhouses, snowball planets, and the long-term fate of Earth.
Breaking Flesh: Performance, Anatomy, Memory
Elina Gertsman
| Date: | 04-05-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 206 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
In his Christmas sermon Puer natus est nobis, Jean Gerson, the outspoken chancellor of the University of Paris, raged against a vile statue he saw in a local Carmelite church: a sculpture of the Virgin whose body split open to unveil the Trinity placed within. Gertsman will explore one such statue — the so-called Shrine Madonna — within the context of late medieval mnemotechnic discourses, anatomical and childbirth treatises, and performance practices that foreground obsession with uncanny anthropomorphic puppets. Through her study of Shrine Madonnas, Gertsman will explore the processes of empathetic beholding of a performing object, which both controls and is controlled by the viewer.
Rembrandt van Rijn: A Conversation
Mariët Westermann, Svetlana Alpers
| Date: | 04-15-2012 |
| Time: | 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm |
| Location: | Cleveland Museum of Art - 11150 East Boulevard |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
This event features a conversation with Dr. Mariët Westermann, Vice President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Dr. Svetlana Alpers, Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley, moderated by Dr. Catherine Scallen, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History and Dr. Jon Seydl, Vignos Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, 1500-1800. These prominent scholars of Dutch art will discuss why Rembrandt van Rijn's technique and subject matter continue to fascinate art viewers hundreds of years after his own time. This conversation immediately follows Fresh Perspectives on an Old Master: Rembrandt Van Rijn, a symposium which features art historians who are contributing to the scholarship on Rembrandt, and is co-sponsored by the CWRU Department of Art and Art History and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Creating a Sense of Place: University Circle — Where the Arts have Created a Life–Enhancing Environment
Nina Gibans
| Date: | 04-19-2012 |
| Time: | 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 206 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public. |
Project Director Nina Gibans discusses this multi-layered project on the history, public art, and architecture in University Circle. University Circle is the core of Cleveland’s powerful history and embodies the civic dream of the Cleveland industrialists who donated the land, lived there, and envisioned and endowed its institutions. This program will include video clips and commentary on the project.
Getting Published
Eleanor H. Goodman
| Date: | 04-20-2012 |
| Time: | 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm |
| Location: | Clark Hall, Room 206 - 11130 Bellflower Road |
| Registration: | Free and open to the public, registration recommended |
This workshop will offer participants an insider's perspective on the changing climate of scholarly publishing in the humanities and provide an overview of the key issues associated with publishing with an academic press. Questions to be considered include how to identify an appropriate press; effective ways to approach a publisher; how to "pitch" your book; the kind of information to include in a prospectus; and the difference between a doctoral dissertation and a book. Goodman will also take a look at what can be expected if a publisher is interested in your book, from the review and approval process, all the way to book's publication (whether published on paper, electronically, or both).
