Recent Events

2024-2025

Sept
7

Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary
of the Battle of Lyman’s Wagon Train

This event is being hosted by the Lyman’s Red River War Foundation. Texas Tech University has assisted the Foundation by helping them connect with representatives from the Kiowa Tribe, who will be participating in the commemoration.

The event will take place at 1pm at the Ramp Ranch located outside of Canadian, Texas. Guests who arrive at noon will be able to walk the battlefield prior to the commemoration. At 5pm there will be a barbecue dinner in Canadian. The Kiowa are planning to do a Victory Dance exhibition in conjunction with the dinner. In addition, the Citadelle Art Museum will be hosting a soft opening of their exhibit “Spirit of Our Ancestors” that day. The Citadelle will open at 10am. The show features Southern Plains artists, including George Levi and Brent Learned, artists from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. 

Sept
11

Speakers Series:
J. Brett Cruse (Texas Historical Commision),
“Perspectives on the 1874 Red River War
Indian Campaign in the Texas Panhandle”

In 1874, the U.S. government dispatched some 3,000 army troops to the Texas panhandle to forcibly move the Indigenous tribes who occupied the region onto reservations that had been established in western Indian Territory. The military campaign against the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes consisted of a series of battles and skirmishes in what is known today as the Red River War of 1874 and resulted in the defeat and removal of the tribes. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the Red River War and its causes and will discuss the salient results of the archeological investigations at several of the battle sites that were conducted by the Texas Historical Commission during their Red River War Battle Sites Project. 

J. Brett Cruse is the Chief Archeologist with the Historic Sites Division of the Texas Historical Commission in Austin. After receiving his master’s degree in archeology from Texas A&M University, Brett worked on various archeological field projects in the U.S. south, southwest, and several states along the eastern coast. In 1995, Brett joined the Texas Historical Commission where he served as the Project Director of the Red River War Battle Sites Project from 1998-2008. He is the author of the award-winning book Battles of the Red River War: Archeological Perspectives on the Indian Campaign of 1874. 

SEPT
28

Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary
of the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon

Texas Tech University has worked closely with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes to organize and co-sponsor this event. Tribal members will have exclusive access to the park on Friday night. On Saturday morning – the 150th anniversary of the attack on their villages – the tribes will hold private commemorations. In the afternoon, they will host a public dance to mark their return to the canyon. The event will include Gourd Dancing, as well as Victory and Scalp Dancing. The Victory/Scalp Dancing will begin at 1pm. The Gourd Dancing will begin at 2pm. There will also be a special event recognizing the Native American horses that were captured and subsequently slaughtered by the military. 

Two complimentary busses available to and from the event with pick up and drop off at TTU. To reserve a seat, complete a registration form through the Texas Tech Teaching, Learning, & Professional Development Center (TLPDC) @ https://ttu.elementlms.com/transportation/ or by clicking here.

OCT
8

Speakers Series:
Vanessa Jennings and Summer Morgan,
"'We should hold onto their ways.': 
Kiowa Beadwork and the Intergenerational Transmission of Cultural Knowledge"

Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings is a member of the  Kiowa Tribe and a renowned beadworker. She specializes in making traditional Kiowa clothing and dance regalia. However, she is perhaps best known for her beautiful beaded cradles. In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized her as a National Heritage Fellow in recognition of her artistic excellence and lifelong dedication to preserving traditional Kiowa arts. The NEA National Heritage Fellowship is the nation’s most prestigious cultural heritage award, recognizing masters in the field of folk and traditional arts. Mrs. Jennings’ work is featured in prominent collections, including those of the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Summer Morgan is a member of the Kiowa Tribe. She is an accomplished artist, known and respected for her beadwork. Ms. Morgan specializes in making traditional clothing, including buckskin dresses, moccasins, and women’s leggings. She is actively engaged in the preservation and perpetuation of Kiowa culture, offering classes and workshops for tribal members. In 2015, Ms. Morgan participated in an initiative funded by the Smithsonian Institution’s Recovering Voices Program. Along with other members of the Kiowa Tribe, she consulted on the Smithsonian Institution’s Kiowa ethnographic collection, providing insight into the cultural meanings of the objects in the collection. Ms. Morgan has shared her knowledge with numerous museums, including the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Natural History, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Ms. Morgan is active in Kiowa cultural life and is a staunch supporter of the Kiowa Black Leggings Warrior Society and the Oh-ho-mah Lodge.

7:30pm, Escondido Theater, Student Union Building.

Oct 12-Dec 8

Exhibition:
Cara and Diego Romero: Bearing Witness to the Anthropocene
Landmark Gallery, School of Art

As partners in both life and artistic dialogue, Native artists Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo) address the quandary of the Anthropocene not by passing judgement or falling into despair, but rather by bearing witness to the complexities of living through this period of radical transition in deeply human ways. Although their techniques, styles, and even personalities are quite different (Cara working in photography and Diego in ceramics), the Romeros seek to make work that is disarming and approachable through humor, pop-culture references, chic stylizations, and refined finish. Whereas popular conservation movements have often assumed an adversarial opposition between human beings and nature, Indigenous philosophy posits that human beings have essential, reciprocal relationships with our environment. We are inseparable from nature, and therefore cultural landscapes are essential frameworks for both assessing the situation in which we find ourselves, and for imaging what futures might emerge to reshape this new epoch. Cara and Diego’s work view the Anthropocene not strictly as an ecological or environmental challenge, but rather through the lens of cultural landscapes, their histories, and the futures that might inform them. 

October 21, 5:00-6:30 PM: Reception for the Exhibition School of Art Landmark Gallery (free and open to the public)
 
October 21, 7:00-8:30 PM: Artists’ Talks by Cara and Diego Romero, Humanities Lecture Hall 001 (free and open to the public) 

NOV
6

 

Southern Plains Handgame Exhibition:
Exploring the Roles of Tradition and Song in a Native American Pastime

Members of the Kiowa Tribe, Comanche Nation, and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes will present a program on the handgame, a traditional Native American pastime. The handgame is played throughout North America, including on the Southern Plains. The presenters will share the history of the game, as well as their efforts to preserve it and pass it on to the next generation. In addition, they will highlight the central role that music plays in the handgame. Handgame songs, sung to the accompaniment of hand drums and rattles, are an important component of the game. After the presentation, they will present a series of exhibition matches, allowing the public to witness firsthand how the game is played. Three teams representing the three tribes will take turns playing one another, ensuring that the public has a chance to hear songs from all three tribes. 

Co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Texas Folklife, the Vernacular Music Center of Texas Tech, and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work.

7pm, Red Raider Ballroom, Student Union Building

NOV
14

Speakers Series:
Joaquin Rivaya-Martinez (Texas State University),
"Indigenous Dispossession on the Southern Plains: The Comanche Case"

Comanches have always had a strong attachment to their historical territory and considered themselves the rightful owners of it. Spread over a vast range that overlapped significantly with the Southern Plains, Comanche divisions claimed sovereignty over distinct yet overlapping territories and shared the bounties of the land with one another. Starting around 1840, however, they suffered continuous territorial losses at the hands of Texans and Americans until their last free bands entered a reservation in present-day Oklahoma in 1875, a process that culminated in almost total dispossession around the turn of the 20th century. In this presentation, I will reconstruct Comanches’ historical range and discuss the roots of Indigenous dispossession on the Southern Plains using the Comanches as a case study. My sources include documentary, ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, and environmental evidence, Comanche oral traditions, and personal interviews with contemporary Comanches.

Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez is Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. He has authored numerous essays on Comanche history and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He is the editor of Indigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, and Power in the Americas (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

7:30pm, Senate Room, Student Union Building. 

NOV
18

Faculty Fellow Talk:
Dr. Ali Duffy (Theater and Dance),
"Story, Community, and Advocacy through Engaged Arts and Applied Performance"

Dr. Ali Duffy is a President's Excellence in Teaching Professor of Dance and Honors, Associate Head of Dance, and Graduate Dance Director at Texas Tech University. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Flatlands Dance Theatre (www.flatlandsdance.org) and a co-founder of the International Parenting and Dance Network. She holds a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman's University, an MFA in Choreography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a BA in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte/

Dr. Duffy's most recent book, Dancing Motherhood, was published in 2023 and her book, Careers in Dance: Practical and Strategic Guidance from the Field, was published in 2021. Two additional books, Research in Dance (Human Kinetics) and Meet the Dancemakers (open access, Raider Press) are forthcoming. She is the co-editor of the Research in Dance Education 2023 special issue, “Dancing, Parenting, and Professional Challenges.” Her written scholarship has also been published in the Journal of Dance Education, the Journal of Dance Medicine and Science, Dance Education in Practice, American Journal of Arts Management, the Journal of Arts Management, Society, and Law, the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, and as chapters in multiple books. She has presented research internationally at academic conferences in Australia, Northern Ireland, Hungary, England, Canada, and across the US. She sits on the Cultivating Leadership Committee of the National Dance Education Organization and also teaches courses in NDEO's Online Professional Development Institute.

3pm, 2nd floor, Weeks Hall

Feb
21

Braiding Sweetgrass:
A Special Event with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

A special event in collaboration with the Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center, featuring Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Join us for this special webinar from 12:00-1:30. Participants can attend the webinar individually from their own device or are welcome to join at the TLPDC for a watch party.

Feb
26

Scholar-in-Residence Workshop Series 
with Dr. Vinodh Venkatesh:
"Writing the Unwritable"

“I am not complete in the mind” ...These are the opening words of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s acclaimed novel Insensatez (Senselessness) from 2004. Quoting the testimonio of a Kaqchikel survivor of the Maya Genocide in the early 1980s in Guatemala, the novel blends together testimony and a fictionalization of real-life events during the transition from Civil War to democracy in the 1990s, events that were structured around processes and institutions of Human Rights. Yet the novel resists to be an accomplice of the supposed universality of Human Rights discourse, instead problematizing its deployment, viability, and verisimilitude in Guatemala (and by extension much of the Americas). This workshop will consider questions pertaining to such issues as Human Rights, the practice and theorization of cruelty and violence, and their relationship with aesthetics and narrative. In addition to discussing excerpts from theoretical and historical texts, participants will engage in close readings of select films, literary texts, and art.

2:00-3:30pm, 228 Weeks Hall.

Feb
27

Speakers Series:
George Curtis Levi
"A Cheyenne's Perspective of the Red River War:
How it Still Resonates Today, 150 Years Later"

George Curtis Levi is an Enrolled Member of The Southern Band of The Cheyenne People. A Member of the Kitfox Warrior Society and Ceremonial Leader, he is also an artist who utilizes his artwork to tell the story of his Cheyenne people. He is married and his wife and children are also artists practicing in different genres.

7:30pm, Media and Communication, Room 067. 

Mar
25

Speakers Series:
Dr. Candace Greene,
"One Hundred Summers: Marking Kiowa History"

Candace Greene holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in Plains Indian material culture, historic to recent, with an emphasis on the Southern Plains. Her publications include Silver Horn: Master Illustrator of the Kiowa (2001), The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian (2007), and One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record (2009). She is retired from the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology, where she now holds an emeritus research position. She founded and continues to participate in the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian.

7:30pm, Human Sciences 169.

Mar
26

Scholar-in-Residence Workshop Series with Dr. Vinodh Venkatesh:
"Madness at the Margins"`

¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. 
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, 
una sombra, una ficción, 
y el mayor bien es pequeño; 
que toda la vida es sueño, 
y los sueños, sueños son. 
--- Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño (1635).

This workshop will consider questions pertaining to both the definition of madness (as a condition and designation) and its deployment in fiction. We will consider how madness developed as a concept in historical terms, and problematize how it may be understood today, both within literature and in other fields. The workshop will include a discussion on the use of madness in narrative (understood in broad terms), and what implications it may have in how we understand the world.

To register and for associated readings, email humanitiescenter@ttu.edu.

1pm, Room 327, Weeks Hall.

Apr
4

Special Movie Screening: Slash/Back 
(Dir. Nyla Innuksuk, 2022)

A special event, co-hosted with the Sexism|Cinema film series. In Nunavut, four girls who like horror and alien movies, love their phones and even their poor elders who believe in shapeshifters because "they didn't have the internet" realize local disappearances are linked to a shapeshifting alien.

7:00pm, The Cactus Theater, 1812 Buddy Holly Ave.

Free admission for first 100 guests at the door.

Apr
5

Celebrating Indigenous Resilience Conference

Join us for a day-long academic conference on our 2024-2025 programming theme. Featuring scholarly panels, a keynote talk by Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Vinodh Venkatesh, and a roundtable on the Southern Plains Beadwork Project at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

9:00am-5:30pm, Formby Room, Southwest Collection, TTU Libaries.

Apr
5

Speakers Series:
The Humanities Center presents 
National Book Award nominee David Treuer

David Treuer is the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, a sweeping history and counter-narrative of Native American life from the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre to the present. Treuer grew up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, trained as an anthropologist, and has spent his career researching Native lives, both past and present. In his moving lectures, Treuer explores the intense struggles to preserve Native identity and tells an essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

7:30pm, Firehouse Theater at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, 511 Ave K

2023-2024

Mar
7

Value/Values Speakers Series:

Dr. Nan Z Da
(Johns Hopkins University)

“On Real and Artificial Intelligence”

This talk poses the central question of language-based, large-data artificial intelligence in literary-critical terms: can you find solutions in empiricism for what cannot be had in comprehension? The latest innovations in this area of artificial intelligence such as the wider application of a neural-net-based attention mechanism to areas as different as corporate and legal "moral reasoning" and "entailment," on the one hand, and aural and graphic recognition software, on the other, allow us to pose the question with more precision and a better sense of real and artificial overlaps. As it turns out, and as Jeffrey Binder and Ted Chiang have recently demonstrated, much that was previously seen as ineffable and elusive can be pattern-detected with somewhat acceptable margins of error; what is harder to replicate is what we might call "important sequence of information that matters to someone." This caveat increasingly matters as more disparate things are rounded up and treated as language models-- i.e. how to predict what x is, given n before it, with internal tests for statistical soundness. These new applications reveal the underlying mechanical workarounds in this kind of intelligence, workarounds which join up with existential questions in literary criticism: "what part of literature is empirically available?"; "what are the benchmark for inferential soundness and what beliefs guarantee them?"; "how much information can really be contained in forms and motifs of language and culture?"; and, finally, "as one processes information in writing where is not just error, but wronging, introduced?"

Nan Z Da笪章难 is an associate professor in the Department of English. She taught at the University of Notre Dame in the departments of English and East Asian Language and Literatures for nine years before moving to Johns Hopkins. 

Da's teaching and scholarship cover nineteenth-century American and trans-Atlantic literature and letters, modern Chinese literature and letters, literary and social theory, and the intersection of literary studies and the data sciences. Her book, Intransitive Encounters (Columbia University Press 2018), asks about literary-cultural interactions that do not lead to synthesis, reflecting both phenomenological reality and various predicaments of global modernity.  Her other published works discuss the mechanisms of disambiguation, literature and complexity, parrhesia and literary criticism, and contemporary Chinese history.

She has taught courses on Transcendentalism and its aftermaths, discourses of China, literature and social theory, as well as traditional survey courses on pre-1850 American literature, world literature, and comparative methodologies. Courses taught at Johns Hopkins will include "Literary Studies as Data Science" and "Nineteenth-Century American Literature.”

With Professor Anahid Nersessian she edits the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press

Join us at 7:30pm at Human Sciences 169.

Mar
27

Yours, Mine, and Ours

A workshop with scholar-in-residence Dr. Adriel Trott

To be attuned to and appreciative of difference and inequality invites concern for recognizing and appreciating what belongs to others. Replacing appropriation with appreciation requires seeing how marginalized cultures and identities are taken up with a pseudoappreciation in the service of the hegemonic culture with little concern for elevating those from whom the appropriation is drawn. For some, the concept of appropriation operates through a fraught notion of ownership that depends on viewing creative work as commodities to which value is attached and through which value circulates. Much of the creative projects of art, music and literature depend on influence and an appreciative referential style drawing on the work of others. Language itself one might say draws on words one did not form to speak. Metaphor functions by moving between one thing to what is other than it in a way that moves from what belongs to one thing to what belongs to another. This workshop will consider questions around the extent to which taking up what is other functions as appropriation especially in metaphor.

Wednesday, March 27, at 4pm. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Loraux, Brill, LaRocque.

Apr
17

Values and Vernaculars Workshop Series:
"Vernacular Learning and Values"

TLPDC Room 153, 12:00-1:20pm

In a changing world in which many are questioning the presumed applications of a postsecondary degree, higher education practitioners are faced with a perennial existential question: What is the purpose of higher education today? Is it to transmit knowledge and train skills for the workforce, or are such justifications too narrow to capture the possibilities for postsecondary education? While diverging perspectives abound (Bass & Thomas, 2023), this session will explore how faculty can design assessments that connect course learning objectives to the embodied knowledges and inherited skills that learners bring to the physical or virtual classroom. Led by the directors of the Vernacular Music Center and the Humanities Center at Texas Tech, participants will engage with a sampling of assignments across our campus by which students demonstrate their capacity to engage critically with the world beyond the university through project-based learning. By the end of this session, participants will have new ideas for evaluating student learning that are connected to their sense of purpose as higher education practitioners. Lunch will be provided.

Please register by Friday, April 12th at https://ttu.elementlms.com/all-events/

Reference:  Baas, L., & Thomas, D. (2023). Calibrating the narratives on the purpose of higher education. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 4, 100222.  Join via Zoom: https://texastech.zoom.us/j/97413135388

Apr
17

Community, Land, People
A workshop with scholar-in-residence Dr. Adriel Trott

Weeks Hall, 2nd Floor, 4:00-5:30pm

Community is good for human beings. We flourish and grow and become who we are through organized engagement with others. When we think of community and political life, we tend to think of a specific group with particular practices and institutions defined in distinction to other groups. The problem with that approach is that it invariably leaves some people on the outside, and in fact, many of the ways human beings have historically construed community -- shared land, shared blood, shared parentage – function to exclude. In the service of considering that it could be possible to think community that refuses to distinguish between those who are valued and those are not, this workshop will interrogate the status and limits of the notion of “a people” as a given or natural community and the notion of land as the ground for community.  By “a people” we refer to a group with a shared history, culture, and language. This can be liberatory, especially in efforts to resist how being so construed has produced inequity, but it might also introduce restrictive and essentializing patterns. “Land” can refer to territory, property, but also to the life-giving capacities of nature, of the earth itself, which sustains all human existence. This workshop will consider issues surrounding the ways that various ways of conceiving of “a people” and “land” contribute to sharing value or to dividing between the valued and the unvalued.

Readings from Sharma, Balibar, Locke, Betasamosake Simpson

Apr
18

Public talk by Dr. Kevan Q. Malone, 
2023-2024 Post-Doctoral Fellow: 

"Borderline Unsustainable: Urbanization, Conservation, and the Limits of Environmentalism at the U.S.-Mexico Boundary"

This presentation examines the limitations of environmentalism in the binational Tijuana River watershed—in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands of San Diego and Tijuana—since the 1970s. American private enterprise has driven rapid population growth in the Mexican city of Tijuana for more than a century. Although sewage overflow in the Tijuana River has polluted American communities downstream since the 1930s, American-owned maquiladoras (assembly plants) in Tijuana have exacerbated the problem since the 1960s. In 1967, the International Boundary and Water Commission of the United States and Mexico agreed to construct a concrete channel on the Tijuana River. Intended for flood control, the channel was also expected to help solve the pollution problem. However, in the 1970s, environmentalists in San Diego blocked the project on the U.S. side of the border, preserving the wetlands around the river’s estuary for a California state park and wildlife habitat. Meanwhile, Mexico moved forward with the project south of the border. Since its completion in 1979, the channel has functioned as a projectile for pollutants from Tijuana into the parkland on the U.S. side. Therefore, the conservation of the estuary was both a win and a loss for environmentalists. While Americans have often blamed Mexicans for the pollution, this environmental hazard must be understood as a product of two historical developments: the division of the Tijuana River watershed between two sovereign and unequal nation-states; and the cross-border economy that has benefitted American companies at the expense of the environment and public health in communities adjacent to the border.

2nd Floor, Weeks Hall, 4:00-5:00pm

Apr
24

Value/Values Film Series:
Xanadu (1980)

with special guest, Dr. Paul Reinsch

7:30pm, Alamo Drafthouse-Lubbock

Tickets available at https://drafthouse.com/lubbock/event/film-club-xanadu

Apr
27

Value/Values Conference
Formby Room, Southwest Collection

Schedule:

9:00am-9:30am: Pastries and coffee

9:30am: Opening remarks: Dr. Michael Borshuk, Director of the Humanities Center at Texas Tech

9:40-11:00am: Session 1: Value Across Space and Time

·       Pavel Andrade (Texas Tech University), “A Genuine Event for Theory, or, Values of the Novel”

·       Daniel L. Bennett (Presbyterian Christian School), “The Valuable Present: Seneca on Time”

·       Katherine Sabo (Texas Tech University), “The Betrayal of the Values of a Revolution and Its Lasting Value”

11:00-11:15: Coffee break

11:15-12:30pm: Session 2: Values, Rhetoric, Discourse

·       T.J. Geiger (Texas Tech University), “Coming to Faith, Coming to Science: Lula Pace, Ethos Strategies, and Demarcation in a Pre-Scopes Evolution Controversy”

·       Kyna Bullard (Texas Tech University), “Superstitious Activities: An Analysis of Sixteenth-Century Spanish Ecclesiastical Writing Regarding Sorcery and Popular Medicine”

12:30pm: Lunch served.

12:45: 1:45pm: Lunch Keynote:

Adriel M. Trott
Professor of Philosophy, Andrew T. and Anne Ford Chair in Liberal Arts 
(Wabash College)"
Humanities Center at Texas Tech Spring 2024 Scholar-in-Residence

"Autochthony and Indigeneity: Conceptualizing Political Life from Athens to Turtle Island"

1:45-2:00pm: Coffee break

2:00pm-3:30pm: Special Session: 

The Value of the Human Experience: Developing an Integrated Humanities Program in the Core Curriculum Across the Texas A&M University System

·        Sharon Kowalsky, History Department, Texas A&M University-Commerce 

·       Debbie Lelekis, Humanities Department, Texas A&M International University 

·       Rebecca Weir, Department of English, Philosophy and Modern Languages, West Texas A&M University 

·       William Bush, History Department, Texas A&M University-San Antonio

7:00pm: Keynote Lecture:

Agnes Callard
Associate Professor of Philosophy
(University of Chicago)

“The Value of Political Equality”

Senate Room, Student Union Building

8:30pm: Reception

Good Line Beer Co.
2611 Boston Ave

Drinks and hors d’oeuvres served.

Feb
13

Prof. Lucy Schiller, Department of English: 

"Unnamable but Clearly Magical: A Portrait of Jerry Hunt"

Jerry Hunt, of Dallas and then Canton, Texas, was as much a guide as he was a musician—at least his performances indicated so. He might play a piano with bells on his wrists and legs, to add a secondary language of unearthly chime. He might wear an Elizabethan ruff around his neck, referencing John Dee, the 16th century man whose "Enochian tablets" Hunt sometimes used as generative constraints. He might talk about the "delicate miniature corn" he enjoyed the previous night, in response to his collaborator's musings on good and evil—part of a performance structured like a conversation, one whose understandability began, quickly, to gape. What Hunt was "getting at" in his work was at once highly particular and hard to describe, and might be best summed up as simply a departure from what is easily known, easily understood. "I don't think anything is at the bottom of the world," Hunt proclaimed once, describing his lack of "value structure." Fitting words for a man whose music, if we can call it that, was sometimes a translation of a translation of a translation, and took audiences away from the familiar by way of modern technology, Texas place names, and references they thought they understood. Also, he was funny.

Bio:

Lucy Schiller is an assistant professor of creative writing, specializing in nonfiction, and will read from a creative essay on Jerry Hunt focused on the tension, in his work and life, between the known and the unknown, the Texan and the great beyond, the present and those other planes of existence only he, in his Elizabethan ruff or his regular-guy garb, seemed able to hear.

Join us for this talk at 7pm at the School of Art Satellite Gallery, 1106 5th St.

Feb
17

Panel, “After Jerry Hunt: A Conversation on Contemporary Art, Performance, and Music Composition,” with Heather Warren-Crow, Natalie Hegert, Justin Houser, and Hideki Isoda

Join us for this panel at 7pm at the School of Art Satellite Gallery, 1106 5th St.

Feb
22

Value/Values Speakers Series:

Dr. William Deringer
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

“Psychic Income: A Metaphysical Moment in Early Twentieth-Century Economics”

In the early years of the twentieth century, the American economist Irving Fisher set out to place the science of economics on sounder footing by redefining some of the field’s most fundamental categories, including capital, income, value, and interest. At the center of this project was a dramatic rethinking of the nature of economic value and its relationship to time. Fisher concluded that the economic value of anything ultimately derived from the subjective satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) it brought to the individuals who used or consumed it, what Fisher called “psychic income.” These psychic benefits were not a static quantity, but were always realized over some space of time, whatever the item—a financial asset, an item of food, a house, a piece of furniture, a piano. Psychic income flowed. All economic decisions, Fisher argued, entailed translating this future flow of benefits into present time. Fisher described this process mathematically through a technique called “discounting,” which would become one of the rudiments of neoclassical economics in the ensuing century. How did Fisher come to comprehend the relationship between time, value, and economic subjectivity in this way? And how did he come to see a relatively esoteric calculation, discounting, as the key to understanding the economic self? This paper—drawn from a book-length “biography” of discounting—recovers an essential and overlooked influence on Fisher’s thinking: the highly popular spiritual and self-help movement known as “New Thought” or “mind cure.” The story of Fisher’s metaphysical moment offers new insight into the spiritual and psychological underpinnings of American neoclassical economics—and a vivid case study of how highly technical ideas in the sciences (like discounting) reflect seemingly distant cultural trends.

William Deringer is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at M.I.T. His research examines the history of the numbers, formulas, and calculations that organize our economic, financial, and political lives. His work ranges widely across time, from compound-interest tables in the early 1600s to computer spreadsheets on Wall Street in the 1980s. His first book, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Harvard University Press, 2018), is a history of how numerical “facts and figures” became seen as an especially trustworthy and powerful form of knowledge in the political realm, focusing eighteenth-century Britain. Calculated Values was awarded the Oscar Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Joseph Spengler Prize in the History of Economics. His current project, The Formula That Rules Our Future: A History of Discounting examines the history of one powerful mathematical technique (“discounting”) that has come to dominate how the future is valued across many modern domains, from finance and business to law and public policy. Deringer’s book will offer a “biography” of that potent yet perplexing calculation, from its medieval roots to contemporary debates about climate change policy.

Join us at 7:30pm at Human Sciences 169.

Oct
5

       Value/Values Speakers Series:

Dr. Marcus Folch (Columbia University)
"Prisons Before Penitentiaries: Incarceration 
in the Ancient Mediterranean"

This talk considers the role of the prison in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on classical Athens.  Whereas prisons are recognized as part of the fundamental architecture of the modern state, it is often assumed that in antiquity prisons were merely jails: temporary detention facilities for short-term custody of inmates before trial and after conviction. As such, prisons are thought to have played a limited role in ancient history. In this presentation, Marchs Folch pushes against the conventional, custodial model of ancient imprisonment. He makes two arguments. First, Folch suggests that prisons were—and were perceived as—integral parts of premodern states. In other words, prison was a thing, and imprisonment was far more prevalent in ancient societies than previously thought.  Second, prison in the ancient Mediterranean has a history, a history profoundly shaped by fifth and fourth century Athenian democracy.  The dynamics of political polarization and intra-elite competition in classical Athenian democracy produced a model of incarceration that outlasted Athenian democracy itself. Long after Athens’ experiment in direct democracy came to an end, ancient authors, politicians, and religious innovators continued to represent the prison and prisoners within conceptual categories that emerged in the democratic period of Athenian history.

Humanities Building (formerly English & Philosophy) Room 108 - 7:00 PM

Oct
25

Value/Values Film Series:

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Alamo Drafthouse-Lubbock, 7:30pm.
Discussion to follow the screening.

2022-2023

JAN. 20 Chicana/x  Latina/x  Working Group

12:00-1:30 PM

FEB. 3 TLDC: "Wise Paths and Rash Pitfalls" with Dr. James Wages

TLPDC 151 or online / 2:00-3:00 PM

 

FEB. 15, 22 Spring 2023 Book Club: Coretta: My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King

Virtual / 5:30-7:00 PM 

 

FEB. 17 Chicana/x  Latina/x  Working Group

 2:00-5:00 PM

 

FEB. 20 The Great Book Reads Club: Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid

TTU Urban Tech or virtual / 5:30-7:00 PM

 

FEB. 22 HEALTH Speaker Series:
Dr. Jane Thrailkill
Entertaining Trauma: The Peculiar Pleasures of Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw'

English and Philosophy Room 106 - 7:00 PM

Trauma has been a key theme for many readers of Henry James’s most notorious ghost story since its first publication in 1898. Are ghosts tormenting the children? Or, is their caregiver inadvertently traumatizing them with her weird fears?

In this talk, Prof. Jane Thrailkill shifts the emphasis away from early Freud and psychological trauma, to early cinema and physiological “thauma” – the peculiar pleasures produced by newfangled optical devices such as the thaumatrope, stereoscope, and early film projection. Known as philosophical toys, these lively tools provide a new lens for understanding Henry James—along with his brother William James and sister Alice James—as experimenters interested in human beings’ sensory and cognitive dexterities.

Following these precocious siblings, and approaching literary works in the spirit of curiosity and play, provides an alternative to recent “turns” in literary studies (the ethical turn, the affective, the digital). This talk will conclude on a note of wonder and pleasure at the myriad artistic adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”—The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Turning—which repeat and extend the complex thrills of James’s story into different genres and for new audiences.

Jane F. Thrailkill is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches U.S. literature and health humanities. She is a founder and current co-director of HHIVE, the first health humanities lab in the United States. She publishes widely on the connections among literary study, medicine, psychology, and philosophy. She is author of Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James (Penn Press, 2022) and Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Harvard UP, 2007). An award-winning interdisciplinary teacher—she also leads seminars in UNC’s School of Medicine—Dr. Thrailkill is at work on an interdisciplinary & collaborative volume entitled Understanding Empathy: A Handbook for Humanistic Clinicians
English and Philosophy Room 106 - 7:00 PM

MAR.
8
Guest Speaker: Dr. Michael Shanks
"Perspectives on the future of technology and the humanities from an archaeologist in Silicon Valley"

How might the research and pedagogy of the academy, and especially disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, connect fruitfully with dynamic agendas in technology development, change management in business, and the challenges of a complex world of runaway crises? How might we address this question of transdisciplinary reach while cherishing the specialized expertise of orthodox disciplines? This talk will present a pragmatist case for managing creative knowledge building in research and learning. Four interconnected case studies will be described: in university education (Stanford Humanities Lab and design programs, project-based learning in Denmark); in science and technology studies (histories of design); in corporate design-based strategic planning (projects with the automotive industry over 25 years); and in critical theory developed in the archaeology of prehistoric Europe and classical antiquity. These case studies illustrate the enduring value of tried-and-tested toolkits drawn from design practice and rhetoric and applied in synthetic fields that can be called design foresight, creative pragmatics, and futures literacy (after the UNESCO initiative). This synthesis of mindset, methods, and concepts that will be familiar to many could be called an argument for a revitalised liberal arts that brings creative design skills (rhetoric) to STEM education, research and development.

Michael Shanks is a professor and archaeologist at Stanford University. His research and teaching supports undergraduate and graduate programs in design, science technology society, urban studies, writing and rhetoric, classics, and archaeology. He is lead faculty in Stanford Foresight and Innovation, directed Stanford Humanities Lab and the Revs Program in automotive history and design. For ten years he was planning advisor to the city and port of Rotterdam, and has consulted with many corporations and organizations, most recently on digital transformation with Biprogy and Aisin, and human-centered design with Nissan Motor Company. His commitment to archaeology continues with projects in the borders of the Roman empire treated though theatre/archaeology, and in the speculative fabulation of classical antiquity. This year MS joined Ng Humanities House at Stanford as resident faculty.

Texas Tech Student Union Building - Escondido Theater / 7:00 PM

 
MAR.30
HEALTH Series Speaker: Dr. Shanta Smith 
"Centering Self-Care as a Liberatory Identity-Based Practice: Retooling to Reckon with the Past, Recognize the Present and Reimagine the Future"

Studies have shown that racism and sexism have profound implications that negatively impact the health and wellbeing of individuals who are marginalized and oppressed based upon their social identities. Join Dr. Shanta M. Smith as she discusses her influential work that illuminates how intersectional identity-based discrimination impacts health and wellness and the role of culturally responsive radical self-care as a resistive retooling framework.

Canyon Room - Student Union Building / 7:oo PM

 
APR.
14
Faculty Fellow Talk: Prof. Aaron Hegert
"Seldom Seen: Visual Resources and Hidden Realities"

 
This talk will provide an overview of Assistant Professor Aaron Hegert’s recent project Seldom Seen: Visual Resources and Hidden Realities in the American Landscape. The project, which was supported by a TTU Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship in Spring 2022, and will debut as an exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Spring 2024, is a continuation of Professor Hegert’s ongoing artistic exploration of the relationship between images, technology, and power; with this work specifically addressing the ways artistic and technical images have shaped the landscape of the American West over the past 150 years. Using the Bureau of Land Management’s esoteric “Visual Resource Management” system as a central node, the project examines the convergence of American Landscape Painting and early Landscape Photography with Ecology and Geography during the period of Western Expansion; tracing a history of how images created in that era conditioned American attitudes towards nature and landscape, and eventually influenced major policy and land-use management decisions, starting with the Environmental Policy Act of 1969. Equally importantly, the project includes new and experimental artworks, created by Professor Hegert and his collaborators, that critique existing artistic conventions, and speculate about ways we may begin to see and depict the natural landscape differently when faced with a future of climate change and biodiversity loss.

2nd Floor Weeks Hall  / 12:00-1:00 PM

 
APR.
14
Queering las fronteras: Border Corporalities in Texas
Physical border, language border: The making of the Spanish to English translation of Basura/Trash (Deep Vellum, 2023) by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny. 

Conversation with author Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny and translator JD Pluecker about the different borders that are crossed when translating pieces written in Spanish on the US-Mexico border.

Location TBD - 10:00AM

In Texas my Queer Body Ain’t Gotta Wait

Public reading by Texas-based LGBTQAI+ authors + Open mic 
Readers include: Saul Hernandez, Aldo Amparan, JD Pluecker

East Lubbock Art House - 6:00PM

 

APR.
29
HEALTH Conference Keynote: Dr. Gail Carlson (Colby College)
"Perspectives on health and equity in the climate crisis"

The climate crisis is affecting human health in ways that are increasingly visible, including via increased heat-related illnesses, respiratory diseases and allergies, higher vulnerability to crop failures and food insecurity, mental health impacts, and shifting vector-borne disease burdens. These harms are disproportionately experienced by populations and communities who already suffer from inequities in health care and other socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Using an equity lens helps us better identify these health harms and recognize how actions to address climate change are also public health and social justice actions.

Gail Carlson directs the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment and teaches environmental public health and activism courses in the Environmental Studies Department at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of Human Health and the Climate Crisis (Jones and Bartlett Learning, 2023). Her research includes characterizing environmental contamination by harmful pollutants, including PFAS “forever chemicals” and pharmaceutical and personal care product chemicals. Her research has been reported by numerous media outlets, including Marketplace on NPR, and her opinion writing about climate change and safer chemicals policies appears frequently in Maine newspapers. She lends her scientific expertise to legislative initiatives in Maine to protect public health from environmental hazards. Carlson received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Virtual Talk / 12:00 PM

Register for event at: https://texastech.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqfu-gqj4sEtHpmUszdqQsZ_7Lht_qXXau#/registration 

 

APR.
29
HEALTH Conference Keynote: Dr. Rebekah Lee (Oxford University)
"Recovering histories of health and patient communities: ‘New’ sources for African pasts"

This keynote lecture offers preliminary thoughts on the problems and potentialities of  ‘decentring’ the archive on health in Africa. Historical scholarship has, in recent decades, transformed our understanding of disease patterns and trajectories, local healing traditions and institutions, the perception and reception of biomedical interventions, and the complexities of ‘Africanizing’ and ‘decolonizing’ public health institutions. Yet, many silences and gaps remain in accounting for the health experiences of ordinary Africans and patient communities. This lecture explores novel approaches to ‘refiguring’ the historical archives on health and medicine in the sub-Saharan African context, particularly through the collection of oral testimonies and illness narratives. It examines the multivalent registers and interpretive possibilities of these narratives, and considers the extent to which these oral texts serve as vehicles of historical ‘recovery’ of the meaning and management of illness and health in Africa. Case studies will be drawn from continuing research on the history of death and of road accidents/road safety in South Africa and beyond. 

Senate Room - Student Union Building / 7:00 PM

Reception to follow - Lubbock Room, Student Union Building