Dear colleagues,
We are most delighted to invite you to attend two distinguished lectures in the humanities at the University of Delaware on November 7 and November 8, 2018, by Catherine Gallagher Emerita Eggers Professor of English, and Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, UC Berkeley. Details and Directions to the Lecture’s venues are below.
Both events are hosted by the University of Delaware’s Department of Art History, Department of English, Department of History, and the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies, the European Studies Program, and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.
NOVEMBER 7, 5:30pm (Kirkbride 204)
Catherine Gallagher, Emerita Eggers Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Why We Tell It Like it Wasn't: The Facts about Historical Counterfactuals.
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern-day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasies or as pop culture fodder, but this lecture will take the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. Focusing on how it has worked and to what ends throughout modernity, it will describe the counterfactual imagination in both historical and literary genres.
November 8, 5:30pm (Kirkbride 204)
Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, UC Berkeley
Sublime Historical Experience, Real Presence and Photography
The Dutch philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit argues that what he called “sublime historical experiences” provide unusually intense, emotionally laden encounters with the past that refuse to be contained in conventional explanatory or hermeneutic frames. Seeking to examine the plausibility of his claim, this paper examines the ways in certain photographs may provide such experiences. In particular it examines the four images taken clandestinely by the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz examined by Georges Didi-Huberman in his provocative Images in Spite of All. Understood less as mechanical representations of what they recorded than defiant actions of the photographers themselves, they unsettle received wisdom about the passivity of Holocaust victims. As Ankersmit himself notes in his evocation of Roland Barthes’ celebrated distinction between the studium and punctum of photographs, they are like the latter in disrupting the coded, intelligible, narrative function of the former. As such, they give us fleeting access to a past that insists on its lingering presence, while refusing attempts to domesticate and tame its putative meaning.
DIRECTIONS
GPS Address: 14 S. College Ave., DE 19716
Kirkbride Hall is at the corner of S. College and W. Delaware Ave. Plenty of meter parking spaces available in nearby streets. Closest Parking Garage is the CFA parking garage at 79 Amstel Ave., Newark, DE 19716 (Kirkbride Hall is located 5 minutes walk from the CFA Parking Garage.) For pay-before-you-leave parking instruction, see:
http://www.rep.udel.edu/plan-your-visit/Pages/Parking.aspx.
Direction to the University of Delaware
From the north:
Take I-95 South to Delaware Exit 1-B; Route 896 North, which becomes South College Avenue at the intersection of Route 4. Continue straight approximately 2 miles on South College Avenue (past Fred P. Rullo Stadium, the Bob Carpenter/Sports Convocation Center, Delaware Stadium, and the Delaware Field House). Turn left on Kent Way and travel one block to Orchard Road. The Center for the Arts is on the corner of Kent Way and Orchard Road. TO THE CFA GARAGE: turn right at the corner of Kent Way, drive 1/2 block and turn left onto Amstel Ave. Drive 1/2 block and turn left into the driveway leading to the CFA parking garage.
From the south:
Take I-95 North to Delaware Exit 1 — Route 896 North, which becomes South College Avenue at the intersection of Route 4. Continue straight approximately 2 miles on South College Avenue (past Fred P. Rullo Stadium, the Bob Carpenter/Sports Convocation Center, Delaware Stadium, and the Delaware Field House). Turn left on Kent Way and travel one block to Orchard Road. The Center for the Arts is on the corner of Kent Way and Orchard Road. TO THE CFA GARAGE: turn right at the corner of Kent Way, drive 1/2 block and turn left onto Amstel Ave. Drive 1/2 block and turn left into the driveway leading to the CFA parking garage.
From the west:
Take Route 896 South into Newark. As you reach campus and cross the railroad tracks, stay to your right and merge onto Elkton Road. At the first traffic light, turn left onto Amstel Ave. Drive 1/2 block and turn right into the driveway leading to the CFA parking garage. The Center for the Arts is attached to the garage.
From Kirkwood Highway:
Travel south on Kirkwood, past Cleveland Ave. and bear to the right after McDonald's onto Main St. Drive the length of Main Street, to College Ave. Turn left onto College Ave. Drive two blocks to Amstel Ave. and turn right. Drive 1 and 1/2 blocks, past the Amy duPont Music Building and turn left into the driveway leading to the CFA parking garage. The Center for the Arts is attached to the garage.
The University of Delaware's Department of Art History, Department of English, and Department of History: Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Eve Buckley, Sarah Wasserman, and Jason Hill. Old College #318, Newark, DE, 19716