CHATs are lunch-time lectures that showcase current research by Temple faculty. Presentations are 30-40 minutes, followed by open discussion. Each talk begins at 11:40 a.m. in the CHAT main 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.
 September 18, 2008
David Wolfsdorf, 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.
His talk will discuss the reception in antiquity of Empedocles' views of desire and pleasure and in particular the relation between the recipients and the source. Given the fragmentary state of Empedocles's poem On Nature, we depend upon ancient recipients to elucidate his thought and to fill in the lacunae. Yet we can be sure that those readers used Empedocles in various ways other than to provide historically accurate and contextually sensitive interpretations. His talk will examine this hermeneutic bind.
 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. His talk, "Tradition, Historical Memory and the Challenge of Belonging in Modern West Africa," will discuss the legacy of slavery and European colonial rule in Ghana to illustrate the ways in which tradition, political status, and identity intersect in modern Africa, particularly as it has been reflected among historically marginalized and subordinate communities. Political elites have employed conceptions of tradition and historical memory as a means to claim and sustain power, and by political minorities, subordinates, and the marginalized to challenge it. While tradition remains a cultural and political point of reference for the past, its most potent form is as a political tool to shape perceptions of the past in order to substantiate or protect current political claims.
 October 16, 2008
Elizabeth Varon, History
Professor Varon's research interests include the Civil War and Reconstruction, History of Women and Gender, and 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.
 October 30, 2008
Fabienne Darling-Wolf, MMC
Professor Darling-Wolf's research focuses on processes of cultural identity formation and the impact of increasingly global communication flows on culture and social organization. Darling-Wolf was born and raised in a small French town, and lived in Texas, Japan, and Iowa before coming to Philadelphia.
Her talk will be about Star Academy, a reality television format started in France in October 2001. Based on textual analyses of the seventh season and of the extensive online presence the show has generated over the years, this paper investigates Star Academy’s discourse about the global and its relationship to the local, focusing on the show’s ability to influence national agendas while simultaneously positioning participants—and, by extension, audiences—as “citizens of the world.”
 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 4, 2008 TBA
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.
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