Upcoming Events
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HEALTH Speaker Series: Dr. Jane Thrailkill
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
8
Guest Speaker: Dr. Michael Shanks
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.
MS 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
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HEALTH Series Speaker: Dr. Shanta Smith
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
14
Faculty Fellow Talk: Dr. Aaron Hegert
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
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
Humanities Center
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Address
Texas Tech University, 2508 15th Street, Weeks Hall 222, Lubbock, TX 79409-1002 -
Phone
806.742.3028 -
Email
humanitiescenter@ttu.edu