28 Apr The 2014-15 UC Graduate Fellows in the Humanities
Andrew Kalaidjian (English)
Jacqueline Viskup (Theater & Dance)
Tuesday, April 28 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
This panel will feature presentations by the two recipients of the UC Graduate Fellows in Humanities award for 2014-15.
Kalaidjian’s dissertation is entitled “Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery.” His presentation for this event is entitled “Weak Ecology.” Given the strong ties between the rise of Ecology as a discipline in England and colonial practices throughout the British Empire, this talk pursues a “weak” theory of ecology that questions uncritical celebrations of “ecological” methods, whether scientific or aesthetic, material or metaphoric. Kalaidjian will present work from his final dissertation chapter, including research conducted during the fellowship year at the Chinua Achebe papers at Harvard University and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature archives at the New York Public Library.
Viskup’s dissertation is “Incendiary Operations: Performing the Female Soldier on the Contemporary American Stage.” Her presentation for this event is entitled “‘This is Me’: The Female Soldier on the Contemporary American Stage.” Because of the tantalizing and controversial presence of the image of the female soldier in American culture, this image is the most resonant and divisive cultural strategy today for interrogating American society vis-à-vis Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. This talk examines George Brandt’s one-woman show Grounded, in order to show that while American news media and popular entertainment showcase female soldiers as eternal victims in cycles of sexual, psychological, economic, and social oppression, theatrical representations of female soldiers forge a new frontier of activist theater that engages radical coalition politics to incite audiences to alter the current political culture of the United States.
Sponsored by the UC Humanities Network and the IHC.