The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture is pleased to host and co-sponsor a range of interdisciplinary conferences, lectures, workshops, and lunch talks both on and off-campus.
For information on previous year’s and Fall 2010/Winter 2011 events, please visit our Events Archive.
Spring 2011 Events
Wednesday, March 30: Material Cultures Workshop
Dell Upton
Professor of Architectural History, Department of Art History
University of California, Los Angeles
Haskell Mezzanine 330
4:3o PM
Thursday, March 31: Scherer Center Lecture
“The Urban Spatial Imagination in the Early Republican City”
Dell Upton
Professor of Art History
University of California, Los Angeles
Cochrane-Woods 157
5:oo PM
Saturday, April 2: Urban History Dissertation Group
“Chicago’s Public School Youth and the Social Experience of the Citizenship Classroom in the 1920s”
Kathryn Wegner, University of Illinois at Chicago
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
3:00 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Friday, April 8: Newberry Seminar American Art and Visual Culture
“Messiness: Embodying Experience in Gilded Age American Landscape Painting”
Adrienne Baxter Bell, Marymount Manhattan College
“Rethinking ‘Luminism’: Aestheticizing Tendencies in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting”
Alan Wallach, College of William and Mary
“Evangelical Space: Art, Experience, and the Ethical Landscape in America, 1825-1900″
Jerome Tharaud, University of Chicago
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
1:00 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Friday, April 8: Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender
“The Gender Amazon: Indigenous Female Masculinity in Early Modern European Representations of Contact”
Heather Martel, Northern Arizona University
Commentator: Cary Miller, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
3:00 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Friday, April 8 – Saturday, April 9: Graduate Student Conference
“New Approaches to America and the World”
A conference organized by Graduate Students in the Department of History
John Hope Franklin Room
Social Sciences 224
1126 East 59th Street
For conference program, please visit http://history.uchicago.edu/about/events.shtml
Thursday, April 14: Newberry Seminar on Early American History and Culture
“Phillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Transatlantic”
Betsy Erikkla, Northwestern University
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
5:30 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Friday, April 15: Newberry Seminar on Labor History
“The Acid Attack on Victor Riesel and the Racketeer Menace in Cold War America”
David Witwer, Penn State Harrisburg
Commentators: Victor G. Devinatz, Illinois State University and Liesl Orenic, Dominican University
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
3:00 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Friday, April 29: Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender
Desire, Sexuality, and the Cold War Body
“Someone to Love: Girls, Adolescence, and Same-Sex Desire in the 1950′s United States”
Amanda H. Littauer, Northern Illinois University
“We Must, We Must, We Must Increase Our Bust: Uplifting the Feminine Breast in Postwar America, 1945-1970″
Elizabeth M. Matelski, Loyola University Chicago
The decades following World War II were a time of “mammary madness.” From buxom Hollywood starlets, to men’s pin-up magazines, to the sophistication of augmentation surgeries, breasts reigned supreme. This project traces the rise and fall in the popularity of curvaceous, large-breasted women in postwar America and its social and economic impact. Despite the esteem for androgynous fashion models like Twiggy in the late 1960s, men continued to eroticize large-breasted women. With their cartoon proportions, sexual abandon, and child-like innocence, “sweater girls” like Marilyn Monroe and her counterparts, was an attempt to repress women’s growing assertiveness in the postwar world.
Commentator: Lane Fenrich, Northwestern University
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
3:00 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Friday, April 29 – Saturday, April 30: Object Cultures Project Conference
The Lives of Things
Keynote lecture
Arjun Appadurai
Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
New York University
The conference was conceived to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective and to explore its impact upon subsequent object-related research. Since its publication in 1986, this text has circulated extensively, across disciplinary boundaries and through different historical, regional, and conceptual fields. The essays—above all Appadurai’s own introduction addressing commodities and the politics of value—helped to catalyze a wide-ranging interest in ‘things’ (in assessing how material objects mediate social relations, in apprehending how the material world constructs the human subject, and in charting how sociality incorporates both the human and nonhuman). They have significantly impacted the way scholars think about the circulation of objects, the construction of object agency, the politics and transformation of value, and the commodity form.
Thursday, May 5: Scherer Book Program Event
Danielle McGuire
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Wayne State University
At the Dark End of the Street
(Knopf, 2010)
John Hope Franklin Room, Social Sciences 224
1126 East 59th Street
12:00 PM
Graduate students may contact Kristin Lueke at klueke@uchicago.edu to reserve a subsidized copy of the book.
This lunch talk is presented in conjunction with the Social History Workshop.
Saturday, May 7: Urban History Dissertation Group
“De-Militarization of the San Francisco Bay Area”
Hugo Evans, Bowling Green State University
“Utopia Negotiated: Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration at Work”
Molly T. Mackean, Northwestern University
Ashley Howard, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Newberry Library
60 West Walton
3:00 PM
Please contact scholl@newberry.org for a copy of the paper.
Wednesday, May 18: Scherer Lunch Talk
Charles Newell
Artistic Director
Court Theatre
Porgy and Bess
Tickets for the show on sale now.
Rosenwald 405
1101 East 58th Street
12:00 PM
This lunch talk is presented in conjunction with the Court Theatre.
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