CHATs are our brown bag lunch series designed to showcase and discuss the research of Temple faculty. Presenters make a 30-40 minute presentation of their research, followed by open discussion. Each talk begins at 11:40 a.m. in the CHAT lounge on the 10th floor of Gladfelter Hall, and the sessions pause at 1:00 p.m. to allow participants to move on to other obligations. If you are interested in presenting, please email Peter Logan.
Fall 2008
Details to come.
September 18, 2008
Gerald Silk, Art History
Dr. Gerald Silk, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, has been Chair of the Art History Department since 2004. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art. Areas of focus include: censorship; portraiture; Italian modernism; the Sixties; and technological iconography. His books include Automobile and Culture and Museums Discovered: the Wadsworth Atheneum and his essays have appeared in Art Criticism, Art Journal, and ArtsMagazine. He has written catalogue essays and curated for museums internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Air and Space Museum, Washington; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo; and Palazzo Grassi, Venice. He served on the editorial boards of ArtsMagazine and Art Journal and consulted for the Getty Art History Information Program and the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles.
October 2, 2008
Benjamin Talton, History
Benjamin Talton is a new assistant professor of African History at Temple University whose research focuses on
ethnicity and local politics in northern Ghana. He has published articles on Konkomba resistance to British colonial
rule, education in northern Ghana, and the government and body politics in postcolonial Ghana.
 October 16, 2008
David Wolsdorf, Faculty Fellow, Philosophy
Professor Wolfsdorf,
Assistant Professor of Philosophy and one of this year's CHAT Faculty Fellows, specializes in Ancient Greek philosophy. He has wide-ranging interests, particularly in ethics and meta-philosophy. His most recent book is Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy,
published in 2007.
 October 30, 2008
Fabienne Darling-Wolf, MMC
Professor Darling-Wolf's research focuses on processes of cultural identity formation. Her work is concerned with the impact of increasingly global communication flows on culture and social organization. She teaches publication design, international communication, gender and the American mass media, history of journalism, and the magazine editing and design “capstone” course. She was born and raised in a small French town, and lived in Texas, Japan, and Iowa before coming to Philadelphia. She also teaches qualitative research methods in the Mass Media and Communication doctorate program, and a six-week summer workshop in Contemporary Japanese Media and Culture at Temple University Japan.
November 13, 2008
Michael Kaufmann, Faculty Fellow, English
Professor Kaufmann's research interests include early American literature, the relationship between theology and aesthetics, and the history of American literary studies. His first book, Institutional Individualism: Conversion, Exile and Nostalgia in Puritan New England, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1999. He is currently working on a book about the how tensions between the secular and the religious have formed the profession of literary studies.
December 1, 2008 (Monday)
Elizabeth Varon, History
Professor Varon''s research interests include the Civil War and Reconstruction, History of Women and Gender, Southern History. She has sought in her work to integrate social history and women’s history with political and military history. Her first book was on white women’s participation and complicity in Southern politics during the antebellum era. Her recent book is a biography of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Civil War spy for the Union and pioneering advocate of women’s rights and of civil rights for African Americans. Her current project is a study of the origins of the Civil War (part of a multi-author thirteen part series on the war), and seeks to integrate the rich new social history of sectionalism (particularly works on African American and women’s history) with the more traditional political narrative.
Spring 2009
 February 5,2009
Miriam Solomon, Faculty Fellow, Philosophy
Professor Solomon works in the areas of philosophy of science, social epistemology, medical epistemology, medical ethics and gender and science. She puts these interests to good use in her positions on the editorial board of Philosophy of Science and on the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association. She is also active on the Temple University Hospital Ethics Committee. Her work has most recently appeared in critical books in the field, including
Handbook of Science and Technology Studies,
Establishing Medical Reality: Methodological and Metaphysical Issues in Philosophy of Medicine, and
Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science: A Volume of the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series.
February 19, 2009
James Salazar, Faculty Fellow, English
James Salazar’s research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, political cultures of the U.S., classical and modern rhetorical theory, and critical theory. He has published articles on the epistemology of character in racial science, gender and the settlement-house movement, and the politics and aesthetics of cosmopolitanism. He is currently working on a book-length study titled Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America. This project examines the development of character as a privileged bearer of national identity in popular cultural texts on “character-building,” theories and practices of literary characterization, and private and state-sponsored projects of social reform.
 March 5, 2009
Jessica Winegar, Anthropology
Professor Winegar's primary research interests center on visual and material culture, the culture industries, nationalism, neoliberalism, social class, gender, value, and the Middle East. She has explored how understandings of history and anxieties about social and economic change are articulated through cultural production and consumption, in particular through competing definitions of culture and culturedness. Her ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt among visual artists, arts administrators, and collectors resulted in the publication of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, 2006) and a number of articles. She is also a founding member of the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology, a group dedicated to increasing the relevance, visibility, and application of anthropological perspectives on the Middle East.
March 26, 2009
Hilary Parsons Dick, Humanities External Fellow, Anthropology
Professor Parsons Dick is the new Fellow in the Humanities at CHAT for 2008-09. A Linguistic Anthropologist, she focuses her research on Mexico-US migration, including such topics as discourse analysis; the semiotics of social difference and political economies of language; transnational cultural formations; language and globalization; power relations; gender, class, and ethno-racial relations; kinship and family relations and the production of "home"; and the impact of policy on migration. The argument of her forthcoming book, Words of Passage: A Discourse-Centered Approach to Migration, is that speakers' sustained patterns of identification with images of personhood encourage or discourage migration by regimenting the social trajectories speakers are more likely to follow.
 April 9, 2009
Chris Soufas, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor Soufas' field of research is early twentieth century Spanish literature and European modernism. He was among the first to advocate the adoption of the period concept modernism, prominent in other European national literatures, in relation to early contemporary Spanish literature. His new book, The Subject in Question: Early Contemporary Spanish Literature and Modernism, which was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the synthesis of the ground-breaking efforts of his earlier books, Conflict of Light and Wind: The Spanish 'Generation of 1927' and the Ideology of Poetic Form and Audience and Authority in the Modernist Theater of Federico Garcia Lorca.
 April 23, 2009
Jane Gordon, Political Science
Professor Gordon is the Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on Civil Rights, and editor of “Radical Philosophies of Education,” a special issue of Radical Philosophy Review. She also is co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell’s, 2006) and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2005). Her current work focuses on problems of legitimacy in democratic societies.
Past CHATs 2007-2008
 April 24, 2008
Rebecca Alpert, Religion
“Jackie Robinson, Jewish Icon.”
The story of Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball in 1947 provided Jews with a myth representative of their experience of assimilation into American society in the era following World War II. Popular Jewish accounts of this story, found in children’s literature and adult fiction, essay and memoir, reveal three themes: identification with Robinson as a victim of oppression, idealization of Robinson as a heroic figure whose success announced the possibility of an end to all bigotry, and glorification of the role Jews played in bringing about Robinson’s triumph.
 April 10, 2008
Montserrat Piera, Spanish and Portuguese
“The Anxiety of Performance in the 15th Century Chivalry Novel Tirant lo Blanc”
Tirant lo Blanc, written between 1460 and 1464 by the Valencian writer and aristocrat Joanot Martorell, is a very entertaining and remarkably well-written chivalry novel which daringly challenges the boundaries between fiction and history. The purpose of my study is to analyze the instances of appropriation and reinterpretation of history undertaken by Joanot Martorell and to demonstrate how this relates to contemporary perceptions of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 by Martorell’s contemporaries and, also, by modern western readers.
Monserrat Piera is an Associate Professor of Spanish in Temple's department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her areas of specialization include Medieval Spanish and Catalan Literature, Codicology and Paleography, and Feminist Criticism.
 March 20, 2008
Rita Krueger, History
“Visions of Legitimacy: Maria Theresa and the Image of Female ”
Maria Theresa’s rule in Austria coincided with fundamental social, economic, cultural and political changes in Central Europe. She was an unenlightened monarch in a time of enlightenment, a religious queen in a time of increasing secularization, a modernizing ruler who still sought power and legitimacy through tradition, and the concerned mother of 16 children who used her children to influence the politics of the continent. This paper examines her ideas about her own legitimacy and the public presentations of her monarchical and imperial authority. While Maria Theresa crafted a public image as the virtuous and clement mother of the citizenry, she also pursued policies that
overtly strengthened the military presence and power of the Austrian state. Crowned King in Bohemia and Hungary, and accessing imperial authority as consort, Maria Theresa believed in the basic underpinnings of the old regime – in the “natural” and God-ordained right of the nobility and the church to sit at the pinnacle of society and government – but she was deeply distrustful and resentful of any traditional political or social institution that might threaten her own power.
Rita Krueger is an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. Her work has focused primarily on early nationalism in Central Europe, particularly within the Habsburg Empire. She is interested in the way national and nationalist rhetoric and activities were integrated into daily life, as well as how national identity and status interacted.
 March 6, 2008
Saul Tobias, CHAT Humanities Fellow
"Nietzsche and the Spirit of Liberalism"
The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche has been associated with a range of political perspectives, but very rarely with liberalism. Nietzsche was a firm opponent of liberalism as he perceived it, and he had many harsh things to say about its foremost philosophical exponents. My presentation explores reasons for reconsidering Nietzsche’s relationship to the liberal tradition. I also suggest ways in which Nietzsche’s thought may prove useful for contemporary discussions about the nature and role of liberalism in the current historical moment.
Saul Tobias is the Humanities Fellow at CHAT. His research interests include European intellectual history, and social and political thought. His publications have appeared in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Oxford Literary Review, Owl of Minerva, Arcadia, and Philosophical Writings. He is currently completing a project on Nietzsche and Political Theory and also writes on the topic of interdisciplinarity in higher education.
 February 21, 2008
Dustin Kidd, Sociology, Faculty Fellow
"Guerrilla Girls: Art and Politics, Then and Now"
The Guerrilla Girls provide a fresh perspective on arts controversies from the past few decades by reminding us to think about who was often excluded from the debate altogether. "Where are the women?" they asked. Where are the lesbians and gays, the Black, Latina and Asian artists, and the working class artists. Their tactics included wearing Gorilla Masks as they pasted their posters around New York and other cities, naming the names of the most discriminatory galleries and critics, rewriting art history, and laughing at themselves and everyone else along the way. Criticized as quota queens, they did indeed keep statistical accounts on who was included in major exhibitions, who held the power in elite museums, who got reviewed and who got to write the reviews. Their posters were alternately identified as political propaganda or artistic intervention. And they are still around today, in many forms. This presentation will provide an overview of the Guerrilla Girls history, projects and tactics; an analysis of the debates surrounding their political and artistic identity; and a look at what has happened to the Guerrillas in recent years.
Dustin Kidd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, where he teaches courses on popular culture and social theory. He has published articles in The Journal of Popular Culture, Research in Political Sociology, The Hedgehog Review, and Afterimage. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the arts controversies of the late 1980s.
February 7, 2008
Priya Joshi, English, Faculty Fellow
"Unspeakable Desires: Nations, Families, and the Jocasta Complex"
Nations cannily use symbolic language and popular media to fabricate and reproduce themselves in public consciousness. In the case of modern India, early Bollywood film was a major vehicle in creating the image of the nation as mother. "Unspeakable Desires" explores the manner in which a Bollywood blockbuster, Deewaar (1975), inverted the dominant myth of the nation-as-family by challenging the sanctity of the mother and effectively questioning the social purpose of the nation. In recasting the relationship between mother and child, nation and citizen, Deewaar played a significant role in refashioning a central national myth in post-colonial India.
Priya Joshi is Associate Professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of the award-winning volume In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). The book is a cultural history of the consumption and production of the English novel in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Professor Joshi is currently at work on another book-length project entitled Crime and Punishment: Nationalism and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema in which she studies popular Hindi film and the fabrication of national identities in postcolonial India. The volume is something of a sequel to In Another Country in its exploration of popular forms, public cultures, and postcolonial modernities in South Asia.
January 31, 2008
Teresa Scott Soufas, Spanish and Portuguese, Dean, CLA
"Isabel I and the Queen's Three Bodies"
A specialist in Golden Age Spanish literature, Prof. Soufas has authored three books : Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature, Dramas of Distinction: Plays by Spanish Golden Age Women, and Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age. She is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Spanish.
 November 15, 2007
Kristin Gjesdal, Philosophy, Faculty Fellow
"Ibsen and Hegel on Egypt and the Beginning of Great Art"
The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen has been subject to a number of philosophical readings (Freud, Adorno, and Cavell, to mention a few). However, less known than these philosophers’ interest in Ibsen, is Ibsen’s interest in philosophy. This paper explores Ibsen’s reading of Hegel and in particular his critique of Hegel’s idea of Egypt as the beginning of great art.
Kristin Gjesdal is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Temple. Specializing in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and 18th-century German philosophy, she studied philosophy at the University of Oslo, and has been a visiting scholar at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, and Columbia University, as well as a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago. She has published articles in journals such as Kant-Studien, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology.
November 1, 2007
Aryeh Botwinick, Political Science
“Shakespeare in Advance of Hobbes: The Judaizing of Christianity as a Motif in The Merchant of Venice”
I have found some remarkable Rabbinic precursor-texts for some of Portia’s legalistic arguments in The Merchant of Venice, which highlight new ways of conceiving of Hobbes’s relationship to Shakespeare and the role of Rabbinic Judaism generally in facilitating the birth of modernity. The Merchant of Venice is often read as an anti-Semitic tract that constitutes a blemish on Shakespeare’s reputation and needs to be historically and psychologically vindicated. A close reading of the play, however, reveals that the dichotomy that classical Christian theology draws between law and mercy gets overcome through an appropriation of Jewish techniques of legal textual interpretation. This paper argues that it is the ancient Rabbinic amelioration of what later circulated in Western public discourse as stark Christian dichotomies that makes modernity possible. An extended abstract is available here.
 October 18, 2007
Alan Singer, English, Faculty Fellow
"Skeptical Self-Deception"
According to Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the disappointments of Enlightenment subjectivity do not necessarily devalue our investments in it. This paper proposes to keep faith with Horkheimer and Adorno’s idealism by grounding post-Enlightenment subjectivity in a notion of self-deception. Unlike standard definitions of self-deception I deploy one that does not capitulate to irrationality. I suggest that in light of recent philosophical work on the question of self-deception one could posit a form of subjectivity which, following Horkheimer and Adorno’s hopes, would sustain the project of Enlightenment through its critique. Such a model of self-deception might accommodate the experience of human tragedy which the culture industry has sought to purge to our detriment. I use the arguably political work of the contemporary German painter Gerhard Richter to illustrate how the idea of self-deception I’m advancing is intrinsic to aesthetic experience. Richter’s ambitious series of blur paintings, figuring the fates of the notorious Baader-Meinhoff terrorists, is entitled October 18, 1977. A view of exemplary paintings from this series will serve to support the claim that politics and aesthetics are not incompatible. More importantly Richter’s work supports the idea that art and politics both entail the experience of self-deception as a crux of self-realization.
 October 4, 2007
Harvey Neptune, History
"Patriots' Pastimes: Popular Culture and the Politics of Caribbean Nationalism"
Harvey Neptune is assistant professor of History specializing in African Diaspora and Latin American history. He is the author of the recently published Caliban and the Yankees: Colonial Trinidad during the United States Occupation (Charlotte: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007), as well as articles in Radical History Review and Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.
His talk is on the influence of "postcolonial" and subaltern studies within Caribbeanist historiography. It contends that this influence has inadvertently robbed the region's anticolonial nationalism of its complex cultural politics. Specifically, a growing and influential body of literature which has falsely represented the empire's twilight years as an era thoroughly and helplessly under the sway of patriot thought. Examining important recent writing on the cultural history of the 20th-century Caribbean, this talk locates the problem faced by scholars' opting for implicit presumptions about nationalist discourse, hegemony and the popular cultural imagination where pointed queries are warranted. It then grounds the critique by turning to World War II Trinidad when the US installed and defended military bases on the British colony. This period of "occupation," the talk stresses, was characterized by the conspicuous insecurity of patriot intellectuals in the face of Americanized forms of subaltern self-fashionings.
 September 13, 2007
Julia Ericksen, Sociology
"Instant Intimacy; A Study of Competitive Ballroom Dancing"
Why does competitive ballroom dancing have such a hold on participants—students and teachers alike? Who gets involved in it and why? How are students and teachers socialized into the world of competitive pro-am ballroom dancing. This is an intimate and gendered world and partners must overcome class, education, age and even language differences to participate. This presentation draws from a book project that explores these issues and questions.
Julia Ericksen is professor and chair of the sociology department. She is a winner of several teaching awards including the Temple University Great Teacher Award. She teaches courses on sexuality and gender. She is author of the book Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the 20th Century, published by Harvard University Press and of the forthcoming book, Taking Charge of Breast Cancer, soon to be published by the University of California Press. She is former Vice Provost and Acting Provost at Temple.
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