Past Lectures, Events, and Book Talks
2024
Event: A Forgotten Founding Document from 1722: The Great Treaty of Albany and Indigenous Theories of Justice
Speaker: Nicole Eustace
Date and Time: Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 5 - 6:30 p.m.
Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library
Nicole Eustace is Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of History at New York University. Eustace’s research involves eighteenth-century North America in the Atlantic world. Her talk is an exercise in creative nonfiction on the topic of settler colonialism.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Grant support: Part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, “Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and the Founding Documents at the University of South Carolina.”
Event: Referendum Democracy: The Very Idea
Speaker: Stephen Tierney
Date and Time: Thursday, October 24, 2024, 5 - 6:30 p.m.
Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library
We live in an age of direct democracy, but also one of political polarisation in which deep-rooted political conflict increasingly affects even traditionally stable and consensual liberal democracies. The referendum is an unpredictable democratic tool at any time, but its proliferation in the context of pluralised and antagonistic identities and attitudes makes it potentially dangerous.
The United Kingdom has lived through two significant referendums in the past 10 years, on Scottish independence and Brexit. In this public lecture, Stephen Tierney will reflect upon these two referendums, asking: is referendum democracy inherently dangerous? If so, why? Or, do the problems we associate with direct democracy arise from bad practice, and are they remediable by good process?
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Grant support: Part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, “Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and the Founding Documents at the University of South Carolina.”
Series: The Humanities Collaborative Faculty Spotlight Series
Speaker: Agnes Mueller
Topic: Holocaust Migration: The Future of Memory
Date and Time: Tuesday, October 1, 2024, at 3 p.m.
Location: Close-Hipp 401
Join us in celebrating distinguished faculty at the University of South Carolina. Agnes Mueller, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, is an expert on recent and contemporary German literature with a focus on German-American relations, multicultural studies, gender issues in contemporary literature, German Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies. Mueller is a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy for Spring 2025.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Event: Bag & Board
Date and Time: Thursday, April 18, 2024, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Location: Hollings Library, Program Room
Join us for a super time. Help preserve comic book history, learn about obscure titles and characters, and vote for your favorite cover art.
Series: The Humanities Collaborative Faculty Spotlight Series
Speaker: Kendal Deas
Date and Time: Wednesday, April 17, 2024, at 4 p.m.
Location: Gambrell 217
Kendal 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 will lead a discussion of his grant-winning humanities research and the grant writing process.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Event: USC Humanities Faculty Book Launch
Date and Time: Friday, April 12, 2024, at 6 p.m.
Location: All Good Books, 734 Harden St., Columbia
Meet the faculty authors and hear about their work. Refreshments provided. Free and open to the public.
- Olga Ivashkevich, Art Education: Teaching Civic Participation with Digital Media in Art Education: Critical Approaches for Classrooms and Communities
- Chelsea Fisher, Anthropology: Rooting in a Useless Land: Ancient Farmers, Celebrity Chefs, & Environmental Justice in Yucatán
- David S. Shields, English: The Ark of Taste
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Event: Adventures in Time: Settler Temporalities and Indigenous Futures in North American Comic Books
Speaker: Mattia Arioli
Date and Time: Friday, April 12, 2024, 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
Location: Hollings Library, Program Room
Mattia Arioli, Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, will visit the University of South Carolina to discuss his current research project centered on the comics in the Gary Lee Watson Collection.
Presented by: The Comic Studies Research Group of the Humanities Collaborative
Event: Peter Wood, Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740
Date and Time: Tuesday, April 9, 2024, 5 - 7 p.m.
Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library
Join author Peter Wood as he discusses the 50th anniversary edition of Black Majority. Book sale and signing to follow.
Sponsored by: The History Center, South Caroliniana Library, Institute for Southern Studies, and Humanities Collaborative
Event: The Postmodern Predicament
Speaker: Bruce Ackerman
Date and Time: Thursday, March 21, 2024, 4 - 5:30 p.m.
Location: Rice School of Law, Karen J. Williams Courtroom
Admission: Free and open to the public
Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, will discuss his forthcoming book The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the Twenty-First Century from Yale University Press.
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 fragmented 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. Drawing on existentialist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Ackerman proposes concrete reforms that could mobilize broad-based support for democracy against demagogic assaults on its very foundations.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Grant support: Part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, “Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and the Founding Documents at the University of South Carolina.”
Event: 2024 Richard T. Greener Lecture: Ripen the Time for a Third Reconstruction
Featuring: Barbara Y. Phillips
Special Guest: Nikky Finney
Date and Time: Thursday, March 14, 2024, at 5 p.m.
Location: Chappelle Auditorium, Allen University, 1530 Harden Street
Admission: This event is free and open to the public.
Barbara Y. Phillips is a civil rights lawyer who has taught at the University of Mississippi Law School and previously worked at the Ford Foundation. Her legal work has focused on voting rights. She has published several essays and scholarly articles on democracy and political participation. Her forthcoming essay is, “Imagine and Create the Third Reconstruction.” She earned her B.A. at Macalester College, J.D. at Northwestern University School of Law, and J.S.M. at Stanford Law School.
Nikky Finney is Carolina Distinguished Professor at USC in Columbia where she is also Director of the Ernest A. Finney, Jr. Cultural Arts Center. Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, The World Is Round, and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020.
RSVP: Register online
Sponsors: History Center, Allen University, and University of South Carolina College of Education
Event: Can Our Democracy Survive This Supreme Court?
Date and Time: Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 4 - 5:30 p.m.
Location: Kendall Room, South Caroliniana Library
Barbara Phillips, long-time civil rights advocate as a lawyer with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, will be 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.
Sponsored by: History Center, South Caroliniana Library, Humanities Collaborative, and Joseph F. Rice School of Law
Event: Divorce? Old Hollywood? Feminism?
Speaker: Marsha Gordon
Date: Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Location: Hollings Library, Program Room
Location Note: Hollings Library is accessible through Thomas Cooper Library, 1322 Greene St.
- 4 p.m.: Ursula Parrott in Hollywood
- 6 p.m.: Writing Becoming the Ex-Wife
Meet Ursula Parrott, early twentieth-century writer who’s seen all of this and more. Get to know the woman who popularized the term “ex-wife” and made challenging the patriarchy her specialty.
You are invited to attend two lectures with Marsha Gordon on her book Becoming the Ex-Wife, which focuses on Parrott’s life and legacy in twentieth-century Hollywood.
Copies of Becoming the Ex-Wife and Ursula Parrott’s book, Ex-Wife, will be available for purchase, courtesy of All Good Books.
Refreshments will be offered for the lectures. Archival materials that sparked Gordon’s book will be on display.
Co-sponsored by: University Libraries, The Humanities Collaborative, The Department of English Language and Literature, and the School of Visual Art and Design
Series: The Humanities Collaborative Faculty Spotlight Series
Speaker: Matt Kisner
Date and Time: Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at 4 p.m.
Location: Gambrell 217
Matt Kisner is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and author of Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life from Cambridge University Press. Kisner’s research interests include early modern philosophy and moral issues related to environmental ethics and community engagement in context of climate change. Kisner will lead a discussion of his grant-winning humanities research and the grant writing process.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Event: Congress: We’d Be Worse Off Without It
Speaker: Frances Lee
Date and Time: Friday, February 2, 2024, 4 - 5:30 p.m.
Location: Harper College 320
Admission: Free and open to the public
Frances Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Despite a long-standing aversion to Congress within U.S. national discourse, Lee will argue that 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 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.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Grant support: Part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, “Civic Engagement, Voting Rights, and the Founding Documents at the University of South Carolina.”
Event: USC Humanities Faculty Book Launch
Date and Time: Friday, January 26, 2024, at 6 p.m.
Location: All Good Books, 734 Harden St., Columbia
Meet the faculty authors and hear about their work. Refreshments provided. Free and open to the public.
- Samuel Ely Bagg, Department of Political Science: The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy
- Deena A. Isom, Department of Criminology & Political Science: Gratuitous Angst in White America: A Theory of Whiteness and Crime
- Ed Madden, Department of English: A Pooka in Arkansas
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Event: Gregg Hecimovich
Book: The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Date and Time: Thursday, January 25, 2024, 3 - 4:30 p.m.
Location: Harper College 320
Admission: Free and open to the public
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 experience 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.
Presented by: Humanities Collaborative, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina
Co-sponsored by: The History Center and Southern Studies
Event: An Evening with The Visiting Room Project
Date and Time: Wednesday, January 24, 2024, at 7 p.m.
Location: University of South Carolina, Rice School of Law, 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.