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Secret Clocks Talk

Research Focus Group Talk: Secret Clocks: The U.S. Military, Einstein’s Relativity, and the Global Positioning System

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

For nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, a debate unfolded among physicists and engineers over how best to include effects from Einstein's general theory of relativity in the new military technology now known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Although some exchanges were published in the open scientific literature, much of the debate played out behind the scenes, in memos, reports, and special review sessions arranged by the U.S. military. Theoretical physicists who had ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Thanatofuturism: Making Space for the Marginal at a Tomb Shrine in Bangalore

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In the middle of Bangalore, India, a small dargah (Sufi tomb shrine) is a space of possibility for multiple marginalized groups, facilitating imagined futures that include Muslims, subaltern Hindus, Dalits, and hijras as full citizens of the Indian polity. At a time when powerful actors seek to limit national belonging to certain Hindu Indians, Anna Bigelow argues that we have much to learn from such shrines and the people who intersect through them as they ...

RFG Event

Research Focus Group Talk: Diving Into the Lake: On the Necessity, Joy, and Anxiety of (Re)Translating Tulsidas’s Rāmcaritmānas

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The epic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa, composed in ca. 1574 CE by the saintly poet Tulsidas, in the dialect of Hindi known as Avadhi, has long been considered one of the most sacred and beloved texts of the North Indian Hindu tradition. It has also, through ten complete English renderings, become one of the most translated works of premodern Indian vernacular literature. In this talk, Philip Lutgendorf will first briefly introduce the epic and some ...

Rory Lindsay - Saving the Dead 5/20/22

Research Focus Group Talk: Saving the Dead: Conceptions of Agency in Tibetan Buddhist Funerary Rituals

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk, Rory Lindsay will share with us insights from his forthcoming book, Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (2022). He will discuss the history of one of the first Buddhist funerary traditions to be adopted in Tibet and the intersecting forms of agency—human, nonhuman, and material—that are described in this tradition's ritual manuals. He will also examine polemical exchanges about these practices and Tibetan innovations concerning ...

Edward Kamens - Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album

Research Focus Group Talk: Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join the Transregional East Asia RFG for a talk by Edward Kamens entitled, "Is a Tekagami a Text? Reading the Fragmentary in a Calligraphy Album." Edward Kamens is Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Yale University, and Paul I. Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations, UCLA. Sponsored by the IHC's Transregional East Asia Research Focus Group, East Asia Center, and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Research Focus Group Talk: Hungry Ghosts and the Karma of Meanness

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The realm of hungry ghosts is one of the unfortunate realms of rebirth in the Buddhist cycle of existence, and those reborn there are said to have led lives consumed by greed and spite. But hungry ghosts know the error of their ways, and they sometimes appear among humans, like the ghosts that haunt Ebenezer Scrooge, as augurs of what may await. Hungry ghosts are like modern felons who participate in “scared straight” programs. In ...

Making Sense of Melothesia

Research Focus Group Talk: Making Sense of Melothesia: Embodying the Zodiac in Ancient Rome and India

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

In this talk Tejas Aralere will present a comparative analysis of the zodiacal melothesia as it appears in Manilius’s Astronomica, a Latin astrological epic poem (ca. 20–40 CE), and in Sphujidhvaja’s Yavana Jātaka ( “Greek Horoscopy”), a Sanskrit astrological treatise (ca. second century CE). Melothesia refers to the mapping of the twelve signs of the Babylonian zodiac on twelve regions of the human body over which they possess particular influence. In a brief discussion of ...

Talk: Missing Babies and Tacit Tolerance of Infanticide in Early Modern Europe

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Aggressive criminal prosecution of unwed mothers who killed their newborns in early modern Europe (1550-1750) has led historians to assume that Europe was less tolerant of illegitimacy and infanticide than other pre-modern societies, including China and Japan. New research throws this assumption into question. In early modern Geneva, authorities often turned a blind eye to the untimely deaths and abandonment of unwanted bastards. These findings suggest that Europeans took a more practical approach to managing ...

Talk: The Murky Past and Contested Future of the Electoral College

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

This talk will examine the roots of the American system for electing its president and explore the possibility—as well as the feasibility—of changing the existing system. The origins of the Electoral College lay in a series of tumultuous conflicts at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At stake was not only what the presidency should entail but how the new chief executive should be elected. Memories of George III's abuses of power haunted delegates. Fears of ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Approaching Classical Chinese Poetry in Early Modern Japan: Intralingual and Interlingual Translation Strategies in Japanese “Remarks on Poetry”

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Residents of the Japanese archipelago have been avid readers of classical Chinese texts in a great many genres from the very origins of literacy down to the present day. To varying degrees over the centuries, they have also been enthusiastic creators of such texts. This talk examines how authors from the latter half of the early modern period (1603–1868) conceptualized and discussed the reception and composition of Sinitic poetry. What strategies did they use to ...

Research Focus Group Workshop: Personhood: Do We Make It or Know It?

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

This workshop will discuss the precirculated first chapter from Jeannine DeLombard’s current book manuscript, “Bound to Respect: Democratic Dignity and the Indignities of Slavery.” (Please click the "Download Reading" button above.) For many of us today, the artifice of legal personhood – the corporate person in particular – provokes outrage. Focusing on the legal fiction of slave personhood, this paper argues that in the 19th-century U.S., the greater danger came from naturalizing this artifice by attaching it to ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Dred Scott & the Retroactive Invention of Citizenship

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

How did Americans understand citizenship before it was defined in the 14th Amendment? If U.S. citizenship was only defined after abolition and emancipation, how did slavery shape American citizenship? Come and talk about these and related issues of race and civic belonging as Professor Carrie Hyde (UCLA) joins us for a brown bag discussion of the (pre-circulated) first chapter of her recent book, Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship (Harvard, 2018). Professor Hyde’s teaching and ...

Talk and Discussion: Peter Manseau, Smithsonian Institution’s Curator of Religion

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Join us for “The Man Who Photographed Ghosts,” a talk on technology, belief, and seeing the dead based on Manseau’s new book, The Apparitionists, followed by a discussion with Manseau on careers in the public humanities. Lunch will be served. Peter Manseau is the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. He is the author of eight books, including the memoir Vows, the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, the ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Origin Story: The Narrative of James Williams and the Formation of the African American Slave Narrative

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

This talk provides a material history of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s first sponsored slave narrative, The Narrative of James Williams (1838), and illuminates how its publication and the controversy that surrounded it shaped the development of the genre as a whole. Teresa Goddu is Associate Professor of English & American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997) and the forthcoming book, Selling Antislavery: U.S. Abolition and the ...

Talk: From the Dragon’s Mouth: A Life in Translation

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Brian Holton is a poet and prize-winning translator of Chinese poetry. Famed for his renditions of contemporary poet Yang Lian 楊煉 into English, he is also the the world's only translator of Classical Chinese into Scots. Join us for an evening in which Brian discusses the art and practice of translation, the experience of working in a minority language like Scots, and his life growing up between Nigeria and Scotland, immersed in a myriad of languages.

Talk: Lawyers and Legal Consciousness in Early Modern Europe: A Cultural History

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Michael P. Breen is the author of Law, City, and King: Legal Culture, Municipal Politics and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon (2007) and numerous articles on lawyers and legal culture in early modern France. In this talk, he will address the following question: “Historians have long believed that lawyers played a central role in the dissemination of legal knowledge and the ideal of the ‘rule of law’ in early modern Europe. Recent scholarship, however, ...

Research Focus Group Talk: Finding Echigo in Edo: Snow Country Migrants and their Urban Worlds

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

The Echigo province migrant was a familiar type in nineteenth-century Edo. Every year in the tenth month, snow country peasants would come down the mountains on the Nakasendō Highway and enter the city through Itabashi Station. They wandered down the main street in Hongō, where they were met by labor scouts who had learned to recognize their bewildered expressions and country accents. Many ended up in the city’s notorious boarding houses for laborers, where they ...

TALK: Discoveries in Japanese Literature: The Beginnings of a Translation History

4080 HSSB UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Michael Emmerich (Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA) is the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (Columbia University Press, 2013), as well as more than a dozen book-length translations of works by Japanese writers including Kawabata Yasunari, Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Akasaka Mari, Yamada Taichi, Matsuura Rieko, Kawakami Hiromi, Furukawa Hideo, and Inoue Yasushi. Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the East Asia Center, the Dept. of East Asian Languages and ...