News & Events

The Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature program is proud to help
announce the launch of a new website www.RediscoveringJohnBerryman.com for the former (now deceased) Professor of the Humanities.

Friday, November 11, 2011 at 2:00 p.m.
Lind 207a
Refreshments will be served.

Please join us for a presentation by Hina Nazar, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Nazar specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, moral philosophy, feminist theory, and critical theory. Her book Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility was published this year by Fordham University Press.

Co-sponsored with the Department of English, the Coca Cola Activity Initiative, and GAPSA.

For more information contact us at nineteen@umn.edu.

Linda Wilbrecht, PhD, (B.A. Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, 1995) a neuroscientist at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is one of 94 researchers named today by President Obama as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Wilbrecht, UCSF assistant professor of neurology, will receive the award in recognition of the promise she has demonstrated as a scientist and her research program on the effects of stimulants, such as cocaine, on the development of neural circuits in the brains of rodents. The research is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The overall goal of Wilbrecht's research is to uncover the effects of drug use and stress on the development of neural circuits, and to develop strategies to mitigate drug dependence.

PECASE is the highest honor given by the United States government to science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. The winners, who will be presented with their awards by the President at a White House ceremony in October, receive research grants of up to five years to further studies that support critical government missions.

Sixteen Federal departments and agencies join together annually to nominate candidates for the PECASE award. Candidates are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education or community outreach.

Neural circuits of the frontal cortex are known to be refined and rewired during adolescence, suggesting that adolescence may be a critical period for higher brain functions such as learning, judgment and decision making.

"It is clear that drugs can change the strength of neural circuits," said Wilbrecht, "and that exposure to drugs during development may have a particularly strong impact on the brain." The challenge now, she said, "is to sort out which specific circuits are altered, so that we can harness neural plasticity - the ability of the brain to dynamically alter synaptic connections - to move the brain back towards a pre-addiction state."

Wilbrecht became interested in the concept of developmental critical periods at age 15, while studying with Harvey Sarles, PhD, at the University of Minnesota. She then studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford University, where she worked on animal models of schizophrenia under Susan Iversen, PhD. Her doctoral research focused on mechanisms underlying the sensitive period for song learning in songbirds with Fernando Nottebohm, PhD, at Rockefeller University. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Karel Svoboda at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Dr. Michael Merzenich at UCSF, Wilbrecht focused on how changes in experience affect synapses in the rodent brain.

In 2008, Wilbrecht was invited to establish her own laboratory at the Gallo Center. Her research group studies the impact of experience on the development of the frontal cortex, executive function and decision making.

"Most people would agree adolescence is a formative moment in our lives," Wilbrecht said. "Our sense of self, our personality, our likes and dislikes, our musical taste, all seem to take more definitive shape during this time. However, if we start out on the wrong foot early in life, it is also harder to change as an adult. I'd like to know why this happens at a biological level and use this information to develop therapies for addiction and other conditions associated with early life adversity."

In 2009, Wilbrecht received the BioBehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Investigators (BRAINs) from the National Institute of Mental Health.

From a pair of "girls gone bad" in 1960s Czechoslovakia to a meticulous depiction of a Belgian mother's domestic routine, And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema highlights the complex contours of the so-called "second-wave" of the women's movement. This 15-film series was created in light of a broader resurgence of interest in women filmmakers of the '70s, and focuses on the often forgotten aspects of feminism. Diverse and international, the movement was concerned not only with middle-class women getting jobs, but also with racism and class across a broad geographical spectrum.

Showcasing directors working outside the economic structures of mainstream filmmaking of their time, And Yet She Moves also accompanies the Walker's premiere theatrical run of Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution, presented in conjuction with her exhibition at the Nash Gallery in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota.

Films are introduced by professors from the University of Minnesota. CSCL Assistant Professor Alice Lovejoy introduces Vera Chytilova's Daisies on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 7:30 pm.
CSCL Professor John Mowitt introduces Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx on Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 7:30 pm.

Refreshments are available in the Walker's Garden Cafe by D'Amico prior to each show.

The series is co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the University of Minnesota.

Copresented by the Arts & Humanities Chair 2011-2013, Moving Image Studies, and the departments of English, German, Scandinavian & Dutch; and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Additional support provided by the Morton Zabel Fund of the Department of English.

For more information and show times visit: The Walker Center Film Page

"Earlier this year, Shaden Tageldin's Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt was published by the University of California Press.

From the publisher's website:

In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt--by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882--in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves "equal" to or even "masters" of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves towardvirtually intothe European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent
inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Hasan al-'Attar; Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, 'Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba'i, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, uhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat; and Salama Musa, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida."

"Just this past week, Jean-François Lyotard's Discourse, Figure was published in translation by the University of Minnesota Press. John Mowitt contributed the introductory essay, titled "The Gold-Bug."

From the publisher's website: Lyotard's earliest major work, available in English for the first time

Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard's thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan's influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason's grasp.

A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious
meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard's later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard's passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language."

Filmmaker and producer Martin "Jim" Bovey Jr. of Wayzata, MN, has generously donated a Bell & Howell 16mm projector and accessories to the Department of
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.

Born in the Boston area, Bovey later lived with his grandparents in Wayzata while he attended the University of Minnesota. In 1950, Bovey and his father founded Martin Bovey Films (later to become Martin Bovey Productions). He went on to create numerous documentaries, often using Minnesota and the Twin Cities for the film's subject, among them Saint Paul: Fur Trade to Space Age (1963). His film The Minnesota
Story (1964) was screened at several national and international film festivals.

On September 20, Bovey will introduce a screening of his films Minnesota Twins: Pride of the Upper Midwest (1961; 26 min.) and Play Ball with the Minnesota Twins
(1963; 28 min.) at the Bell Museum. He will also be available for a Q&A.

The Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa) hosted the Annual Dean's Distinguished Lecture entitled: The Humanities and the University in Ruin which was delivered by Professor John Mowitt in the Departments of Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature and English at the University of Minnesota, USA.

Mowitt's talk centered on the status of the humanities in post-secondary education especially "now that the traditional Eurocentric and neo-liberal legitimations of it have lost their authority".

Professor Mowitt is primarily working in the intersections of Theory, Culture, and Politics and is also senior editor of the journal Cultural Critique and author of a number of publications, among others, Percussion Drumming, Beating, Striking.

A transcript and video recordings of both parts of the talk in its entirety can be found HERE:

CSCL Associate Professor and Filmmaker, Hisham Bizri, will screen his new work, A Film, as part of the 2011 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival's Experimental Film program.

The first of its kind at the festival in over 5 years, the program will screen 11 films from international filmmakers pushing the definition of cinema and the boundaries of image-making into new territory. The screening will take place April 29, 2011 at 7pm at St. Anthony Main Theater, 125 SE Main Street, Minneapolis, 55414.The program will screen in conjunction with Pip Chodorov's documentary, Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film on April 28, 2011, at 9:15 pm.

Following the screening, Professor Bizri will join pioneering experimental film curator Sally Dixon and other industry professionals in attendance for a panel discussion on Avant-garde film. More information on the Experimental Film Program can be found here.

Professor Bizri will also be seated on the "How To Make My Movie: The MN Filmmaking Scene" panel at 4:30pm on Saturday, April 30th along with 5 other Minnesota-based filmmakers and producers. The panel will address the current requirements to make and finance a film in Minnesota and is free to the public. More information on The MN Filmmaking scene panel can be found here.

Ms. Mund, who has extensive experience in film programming, conference organizing, and publication on film, both here and internationally, is managing initiatives to enhance CLA's film and media curriculum, advance the work of CLA faculty and students in film and media studies, and extend CLA's presence in the local, national, and international film/media community.

Verena Mund
612-625-2901
213 Nicholson Hall

Alice Lovejoy received her Ph.D. from Yale University's program in Film Studies and Comparative Literature in 2009. Her research interests include the relationship between cinema and the state, "marginal" and experimental forms of production, and theories of history and the public sphere. She is currently working on a book project that traces the emergence of an experimental film culture in the Czechoslovak Army film studio in the 1950s and 1960s; other current projects include a transnational study of state-administered children's film and television studios and a translation of Czech theorist Karel Teige's 1925 Film. Among her forthcoming publications are book chapters on the reception of André Bazin's film theory in Eastern Europe and on samizdat "television" in post-1968 Czechoslovakia. She is also a filmmaker, film curator, and critic, and has been a contributor and editor at Film Comment magazine since 2001.