Faculty Research Forum is a forum for talks by our faculty and the occasional guest on humanities and social science topics of interest to interdisciplinary audiences.  These forums are sponsored by the Commonwealth Center with assistance from the College of Arts and Sciences.

Faculty Research Forums are held in the Bingham Humanities Building, Room 300 and begin at 3:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted.

The Commonwealth Center for the Humanities

and Society’s

FACULTY RESEARCH FORUM

Presents an

End-of-Term Celebration

and Book Party

Friday, April 25, 2008

3:30 p.m., Bingham Humanities Room 300

Please come and celebrate the end of the term and honor those among us who

have published books recently. 

Excellent Refreshments!

Authors and Editors: If you have published a scholarly or creative book since January 1, 2007, please come and bring your book for display.  Authors and editors please RSVP to jennifer.stephens@louisville.edu.

Free and Open to the Public

502-852-8977

Previous Faculty Research Forums

March 28, 2008
"Virginia Woolf Among Lunatics"
Presented by Suzette Henke, Department of English

Please note: Prof. Henke's presentation will serve as the Keynote Address for Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinary Study in the Arts and Humanities.  This presentation will take place in the Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library at 3:30 p.m. There will be a reception in Bingham Humanites 300 immediately following the presentation.

Why have modern scholars so persistently analyzed Woolf's mental distress as virtually unique -- the affliction of a genius set apart from other men and women of the Victorian and Edwardian ages?  By examining case histories of women and men incarcerated in Britain's Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane, Professor Henke suggests analogies between Woolf's reported symptoms and those observed in patients admitted to institutional confinement at the turn of the century.  Lacking a category for post-traumatic stress disorder, Victorian and Edwardian physicians were prone to misdiagnose the condition of trauma survivors in terms of mania or depression - even in the cases where an obvious traumatic wound had precipitated mental crisis.  This paper explores ways in which case histories of both male and female patients at the Holloway Sanatorium bear uncanny resemblance to the psychiatric profile of Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf's projected alter ego in Mrs. Dalloway.  Smith and his creator, along with the inmates of Holloway, all manifest recognizable symptoms of  post-traumatic stress disorder that "mime" other psychiatric disorders.  Drawing on archival resources from the Wellcome Medical Library in London, as well as on holograph manuscripts in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Professor Henke offers an analysis of Woolf's narrative reformulation of both personal and historical trauma through the aegis of scriptotherapy.

February 8, 2008
"Literary or Postcolonial? Notes on literature and its unfamiliars in the writings of J.M. Coetzee, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Dionne Brand"
Presented by Simona Bertacco, Assistant Professor, Universita' di Milano and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Louisville
Click here to see a description of this presentation

January 18, 2008
"Dominion and Property: An Archeology of Roman Law"
Presented by Professor A.J. Slavin, Humanities Professor Emeritus

November 9, 2007
"Global Concerns through Local Moral Idioms: An African Perspective" Presented by Professor Dismas Masolo, Department of Philosophy
Click here to see a description of this presentation