Previous Seminar Themes

2023 - 2024

Mourning

Over the past two decades, there has been a notable surge of interest in the themes of loss, grief, and mourning in the field of political theory. Different from the “traditional” readings of the topic, which concentrated on the state’s manipulation of memory and grief, the importance of public works of mourning is recognized as a site in which unrepresented and marginalized groups can work through political and social tensions that resist resolution through other means. This approach to mourning is informed by global traumas such as the AIDS epidemic, the end of communism and apartheid, 9/11 and the nameless losses of the war on terror and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic and BLM movement; the practices of mourning developed in these moments by social movements, individuals and a grief industry of counseling and research, raise very important questions about the current state of capitalism, the limits of the state and of secularism, social media, technology and different concepts of the Subject. In other fields of research, such as the neurosciences, public health and policy, the arts and humanities, scholars engage with these questions by endeavoring to reframe loss and grief beyond the binary of mourning (a finite process with a fixed outcome) and melancholia (pathological attachment to loss). As such, mourning appears as an interdisciplinary and relevant object of study.

Read more …

2022 - 2023

Colonial / Postcolonial / Decolonial

Our seminar will explore the many aspects of the colonial past that haunt and shape the 21st century. This is an inquiry that touches every discipline in todays’s academy. The rise of the modern research university as instantiated among the North Atlantic nations coincides with the global expansion of colonialism. In what ways have different forms of producing knowledge in the West contributed to the creation, justification, implantation, and execution of colonialism? Equally important, how have the disciplines provided tools of analysis, criticism, contestation, and liberation from the effects of colonialism? In the case of the USA, the research universities are themselves located in a settler colony with a deep case of amnesia about the conditions of its own creation.

Read More …

2021 - 2022

Media

Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, media change not only impacted all areas of cultural production: it has also become an important focus of research in the humanities and social sciences. Phrases like media studies, media history, or media archaeology have come to designate entire disciplines or interdisciplinary fields of research, and an interest in the technologies, the social and political implications, and the conceptual and perceptual import of particular media and their historical transformations opened up new ways of thinking about specific cultural and social phenomena and also about culture and society in general. Aiming to generate a discussion about media as cultural technologies which transform both the world and human experience, this seminar will bring together faculty whose research is informed by some attention to such technologies. The formal, artistic affordances of a particular medium, changes in cultural practices brought about by changes in the medium, strategies of cultural representation produced by a particular media constellation, the impact of new media on the cultural imaginary, the politics of media access and control are all examples of potential topics, as is scholarship in visual culture, book history, sound studies, or linguistic anthropology, among others. The shape of the seminar will be defined by the interests of the participants. The monthly meetings will be organized around a selection of readings proposed by organizer and participants, potentially including unpublished work by seminar members.

2020-2021

Pandemic

Pandemic is, of course, the topic of our day, but these seminars will focus on beyond the here and now. Speakers and faculty will be invited to think about "pandemic" in the broadest ways possible and in any field, scholarly or creative, humanities or social sciences. How do the fields of religion, history, science, politics — local and global — "think" about "pandemic"? How does the current pandemic intersect with or disrupt the knowledge we have accumulated on the body, emotions, institutions, trauma, resilience, climate change, and war?

2019-2020

The Archive

Archives are central to scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences, and are also utilized widely in the arts, as resource and inspiration. The traditional notion of the archive as an objective, institutional repository of material has changed in recent decades, due to the rise of the digital humanities as well as the increased importance of community archives engaged in preserving the histories of marginalized groups and political movements.

This year, our seminar will address such questions as: what is recorded and preserved, what is omitted or lost, who decides and on what basis? How can the Archives be utilized to call attention to, and take steps toward restoring, lost or erased histories? What difference do digital tools and digital accessibility make in both archiving and accessing the past? How do archives encourage creative expression, especially among artists from communities that have been historically silenced? How reliable is oral history, and how can we address the vagaries of memory? How do we read the gaps in the archives, and what about the risks of misreading?

2018 - 2019

Communicating with Objects

In terms that anticipate Marx on commodity fetishism or Adorno on the culture industry, Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads inveighs against a “craving for extraordinary incident” produced by “the increasing accumulation of men in cities” and gratified by “the rapid communication of intelligence.” To this situation he opposes the conditions of “humble and rustic life,“ where the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” and “men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.”

We may smile at Wordsworth’s idealizations of rural life, but his expansive attention to the different ways in which people may “communicate with objects” – to the problematic, we might say, of object relations – is as prescient and instructive as his critique of an urban culture coming to be dominated by the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities and mass media. The 2018-19 Rifkind Center faculty invites its participants to reflect on and discuss the changing role of objects – natural, fabricated, historical, conceptual – in their fields of study and cultural production. Historical study arguably awards more attention to material culture than ever before; our former colleague David Jaffee’s last book, The New Nation of Goods: Artisans, Consumers, and Commodities in Early America, 1790–1860 (2010), may serve as one example among many. Bill Brown’s influential 2001 essay, “Thing Theory,” is a well-known instance of a related turn in literary studies, which he places in the context of “a new materialism within which the thingness of an object cannot be abstracted from the field of culture.” (See the online description (http://ccct.uchicago.edu/object-cultures) of the “Objects Culture Project” which he currently directs for a suggestive overview.) More broadly, concerns with the materiality of language and the history of print have been central to literary studies now for decades. The relations of works of art to both natural objects and other man-made ones have long preoccupied both the working artist and the art historian and assume a new urgency and complexity in the de-materializing context of digitalization. The ways in which objects and representations circulate in modern society is obviously central to the work of MCA, and the very distinction between objects and representations is a long-standing problem in philosophy, whether from the analytic or the continental sides. I hesitate to venture a generalization about music but would imagine that the question of the relationship of music to the objects through which it is produced and recorded has been made more acute with the ascendancy of digitalization.

Readings for the group will be largely shaped by the interests and backgrounds of the participants but could include works by Marx, Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Debord, Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Bowlby.

Guest Speaker: Joshua Wilner, English

2016 - 2017

Emotions

Over the past decade and a half emotions have moved to the forefront of scientific investigation, humanistic inquiry, and artistic practice. This development owes much to research in the neurosciences, which has challenged scholars in the arts and humanities to reframe their endeavors in light of the new perspectives opened up by the neural age. But other developments have played their part as well: the rise of social media and of new social movements, the global phenomenon of “terror”, and the impact of on-going processes of dislocation, conflict, and trauma in the early 21st century.

Standing at the intersection of science, the humanities, and the arts, emotions have emerged as interdisciplinary objects par excellence. This seminar is open to faculty who engage with the topic of emotions from a wide range of perspectives. Participants may explore the representation and mobilization of emotion in art, literature, film and music; the question of whether emotions have a history, and conversely, whether they make history; the implications of emotions studies for philosophical practice; and the role played by fear, empathy, passion, and guilt, in politics, religion, and war.

Readings

William Reddy, “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions”, in Emotion Review 1,4 (2009): 302-315
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford 2015), Intro, chs. 1, 3
Jesse Prinz, “The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgments,” Philosophical Explorations 9,1 (2006)
Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford 2007), ch. 2
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011)
Joseph Ledoux, TBA
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of the Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (Verso 2002), selections
Corey Robin, Fear: History of a Political Idea (Oxford 2004), Intro, ch 1-3
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard 2005)

Guest Speakers
Jesse Prinz (CUNY Graduate Center)
Joseph LeDoux (NYU)
Ruth Leys, Johns (Hopkins University)

Participant List

Andrea Weiss, Documentary Filmmaker & Nonfiction Author
Andreas Killen, Professor of History
Chad Kidd, Publishing Author
Elazar Elhanan, Assistant professor of Jewish Studies
Elizabeth Mazzola, Professor of English
Jeffrey Blustein, Professor of Bioethics and Professor of Philosophy
John Blanton, Assistant Professor of History
Jonathan Pieslak, Professor and Composer
Hidetaka Hirota, Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Václav Paris, Assistant Professor of English

2015 - 2016

MIGRATIONS

Millions of people today live outside the nations of their birth. Whether because of war and conflict and their aftermath or because of economic or political duress, migration has remade the demographic, social, economic, political and cultural landscapes of many societies around the world. The Rifkind seminar sought to interrogate experiences of migration, deportation, exile – and their aftermaths – through multiple disciplinary lenses. Participants focuses on, for example: representations of the migration experience in memoir and fiction; studies of how and when new migrants are incorporated into existent societies or create new ones; or of current approaches to immigration, citizenship and societal membership, including debates over “multi-culturalism” and “pluralism.” Some focused on a specific geographical or temporal context or on more general questions of philosophy or policy.