This article from The Daily Gamecock highlights the success of the Humanities Collaborative in fostering interdisciplinary
discussions and propelling the humanities into a bright future.
Spring 2024 Events
Gregg Hecimovich
(co-sponsored with Southern Studies and the History Center) |
Date and Time: January 25 at 3:00-4:30 pm Location: Harper College 320 Gregg Hecimovich—Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard University and professor of English at Furman University—will discuss his widely-acclaimed new book, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts. Hecimovich uncovers the life of Hannah Crafts, author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative and believed to be the first African American woman novelist. Hecimovich traces Hannah Craft’s experiences with enslavement—and subsequent escape—through the interconnected experiences of Craft’s friends and contemporaries within the antebellum South to reclaim a formerly lost history and to illuminate the life of an extraordinary writer. |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Gregg Hecimovich |
Date and Time: January 25 at 6:30-7:30 pm Location: All Good Books |
Book Launch for Samuel Bagg, Ed Madden, and Deena Isom
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Date and Time: January 26 at 6:00 pm Location: All Good Books Celebrate faculty authors with the launch of recent publications, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy, A Pooka in Arkansas, and Gratuitous Angst in White America: A Theory of Whitness and Crime, by Samuel Ely Bagg, Ed Madden, and Deena A. Isom. Meet the faculty and hear about their work. This event is free and open to the public with refreshments provided. |
Frances Lee
(Mellon Seminar) |
Date and Time: February 2 at 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Harper College 320 Frances Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Lee has broad interests in American politics, with a special focus on congressional politics, national policymaking, party politics, and representation. She is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (2016) and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (2009). Lee will discuss how despite a long-standing aversion to Congress within US national discourse, Congress is crucial for governance. Although flawed, Congress deserves appreciation. The contemporary Congress is not mired in constant gridlock but characterized by give-and-take and and mutual accommodation that unites the country. Amidst extreme political polarization and a country divided roughly 50-50 down the middle, Congress functions so as to lower the stakes and the temperature. The difficulty of enacting legislation on simple party-line votes means that legislation requires cross-party consensus building. |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Frances Lee
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Date and Time: February 2 at 12:00 pm Location: All Good Books |
Aziz Rana
(Mellon Seminar) |
Date and Time: March 14 at 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Rice School of Law (Karen J. Williams Courtroom) Aziz Rana is Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. Rana is a prolific author and scholar specializing in American constitutional law and political development, especially in terms of how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding. Rana will discuss his forthcoming book The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), an eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world. Rana explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life. The veneration of the Constitution reflects greater political challenges in the US from justifying interventionist national state policies on a global scale to the struggles of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—to imagine different constitutional horizons. |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Aziz Rana
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Date and Time: March 15 at 12:00 pm Location: All Good Books |
Bruce Ackerman
(Mellon Seminar) |
Date and Time: March 21 at 4:00-5:30 pm Location: Rice School of Law (Karen J. Williams Courtroom) Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, and the author of nineteen books in political philosophy, constitutional law, and public policy. Ackerman will discuss the forthcoming The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the Twenty-First Century (Yale Press, 2024). Human beings have taken one thing for granted since our earliest days: we are bodily creatures dealing with one another on a face-to-face basis. The internet has shattered this fundamental feature of human existence. We are suddenly living our lives in two worlds at once—shifting endlessly from virtual to physical reality as we reach out to others. Existentialist thinkers of the twentieth century like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre considered the fragmentation of modern life as a central source of contemporary anxieties. Like them, Ackerman views the challenges of the internet age as a political, no less than personal, problem—and proposes concrete reforms that that could mobilize broad-based support for democracy against demagogic assaults on its very foundations. |
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Bruce Ackerman |
Date and Time: March 22 at 12:00 pm Location: All Good Books |
Matt Kisner |
Date and Time: February 7 at 4:00 pm Location: Gambrell 217 Matt Kisner is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Kisner's research interests include early modern philosophy, particularly the interum of moral philosophy between the decline of traditional eudaimonistic ethics at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the emergence of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics at the end of the eighteenth century, and moral issues related to environmental ethics and community engagement in context of climate change. Kisner is the author of Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life (Cambridge University Press, 2011). |
Kendall Deas
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Date and Time: April 17 at 4:00 pm Location: Gambrell 217 Kendall Deas is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Deas' research interests include education policy, law and politics with a focus on the politics of pre-k-12 education reform and eradicating the achievement gap. Deas has published “EPSCOR: State Science and Technology-Based Economic Development Policies and the Role of Higher Education Institutions" in the International Journal of Humanities and Science (Vol. 11 No. 8) and "Legal Implications of Race-Based School Funding Policies to Close Racial Achievement Gaps in Education" in the Journal of Education & Social Policy ( Vol. 9, No. 1). |
Visiting Room Project
(Carceral Studies)
Date and Time: January 24 at 7:00 pm
Location: Rice School of Law 103 (Karen J. Williams Courtroom)
The Visiting Room Project is the largest archive of filmed testimonials ever gathered from people serving life in prison. At “An Evening with The Visiting Room Project,” co-creator Dr. Marcus Kondkar will introduce the project and screen interviews from The Visiting Room. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with formerly-incarcerated contributors to the project and time for questions from the audience. We hope you will join us to reflect on the lives of life-sentenced people and consider their pasts, their hopes, and their daily struggles.
Marsha Gordon
(Co-sponsored by the University Libraries, The Department of English Language and Literature, and The School of Visual Art and Design)
Ursula Parrott in Hollywood
Date and Time: February 7 at 4:00 pm
Location: Program Room in Hollings Library (accessible through the Thomas Cooper Library at 1322 Greene St.)
Book Talk about Becoming the Ex-Wife
Date and Time: February 7 at 6:00 pm
Location: Program Room in Hollings Library (accessible through the Thomas Cooper Library at 1322 Greene St.)
Marsha Gordon--the director of the Film Studies program and Professor of English at North Carolina State Univeristy in addition to being a NEH Public Scholar 2020-21--is the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023). She will deliver two public talks discussing her work and Ursula Parrott.
"Can our Democracy Survive this Supreme Court?"
(Co-sponsored by the History Center, South Caroliniana Library, and Joseph F. Rice School of Law; Mellon Seminar)
Date and Time: March 13, 4:00-5:30 pm
Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library
Barbara Phillips, formerly an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, in conversation with civil rights attorney Armand Derfner, who has helped shape the Voting Rights Act in numerous Supreme Court arguments. He is coauthor of Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court.
Peter Wood
(Co-sponsored by the History Center, Institute for Southern Studies, and South Caroliniana Library; Mellon Seminar)
Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740
Date and Time: April 9 at 5:00-7:00 pm
Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library
Peter Wood will visit USC for a series of events marking the publication of the fiftieth anniversary edition of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740, his groundbreaking history of Blacks in colonial South Carolina. Event includes book talk, signing, and reception.
AGB Book Talk and Signing with Peter Wood
Date and Time: April 10 at 10:00-11:30 am
Location: All Good Books
Peter Wood will lead a book group discussion. Twenty copies of Black Majority are available on a first come basis for those who would like to read the book in advance of Peter’s visit and participate in the discussion. If you are interested in joining the group, please contact Maclane Hull to reserve a book.
Sir Walter Scott Conference
(Co-sponsored by The Department of English Language and Literature)
Date and Time: May 24-25 at TBD
Location: TBD
Presenter: Yoon Sun Lee
Learn more about our Digital Humanities talks.
Upcoming Events
Getting Started with Digital Humanities Tools
Thursday, Apr. 18, 2024
Location: Thomas Cooper Library L118 Technology Classroom