The Stanford Humanities Center will sponsor a Dissertation Writing Group in 2012-13.
This program fosters intensive and supportive exchange across humanistic fields for those in the final stages of dissertation writing. Graduate students from a variety of humanities departments present and discuss their work in a multidisciplinary context. Students whose projects cut across a number of fields may find this forum especially helpful to their scholarship.
Eligibility
Stanford graduate students from humanities departments who have advanced to the chapter-writing phase of the dissertation.
Commitment
Meetings will be held at the Humanities Center from 4 to 6 pm on Thursdays every other week. Eligible students may sign up to participate during one of three quarters (autumn, winter, or spring) and must agree to attend all meetings held during that quarter (5 meetings total). Participation will be limited to a maximum of 10 students per quarter.
Format
Up to two participants will pre-circulate a chapter or portion of a chapter (no more than 35 pages) by Friday of the week preceding each meeting. The group will read these chapters in advance. Each chapter will receive approximately 45 minutes of structured feedback and constructive critique. A short portion of each meeting will be devoted to general concerns of the group.
Guests
Participants may invite advisors, committee members, and other interested parties to read pre-circulated chapters and attend the meeting at which they present.
Facilitation
The Associate Director of the Humanities Center will run the workshop.
Sign up now!
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Fellows Spotlight: Johanna Yunker
by Brianne Felsher
Art cannot be separated from the history and culture that surround and influence it. Johanna Yunker is proving this point in “Socialism and Feminism in East German Opera,” the dissertation she is writing as a graduate student of musicology at Stanford University and a Geballe Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her work looks at the careers and works of two East German artists: Ruth Zechlin, composer and musician, and Ruth Berghaus, opera director and choreographer. How were these women’s lives and artistic products influenced by the socialist state? By the avant-garde art community? By East Germany’s particular type of feminism? These are the questions that Johanna Yunker explores in her work.
The answers are complicated: “Women in East Germany had a very unusual position [because of socialism],” Yunker explains. They had a “literary feminism… It was not about protesting or changing laws.” She shows how the two artists approached womanhood, feminism, and gender roles in different ways. Director Ruth Berghaus’ 1982 production of Les Troyens, for example, featured a strong female lead as well as a program that included exerpts from the novel Cassandra by Christa Wolf, one of East Germany’s most influential female writers. In contrast, Ruth Zechlin wanted people to think of her simply as a composer, not, as many people did, always a “female composer.” Zechlin said of her music, “To me it is entirely unimportant if a work was composed by a woman or a man. It just counts if the music is good or bad.”
Yunker spent a year in Berlin learning German, listening to opera and sifting through musical scores, newspaper reviews, photographs, and decaying VHS recordings of productions from the 1980s. Although both Zechlin and Berghaus have passed away, Yunker was able to gain unprecedented access to both womens’ personal archives through contact with their families. She has been able to digitize much in these archives to preserve them for future generations.
After she receives her doctorate, Yunker expects to teach music, and hopes to “continue [researching the] large cultural picture.” We shall be watching as she integrates feminism, culture, and art of the twenty-first century into her own professional and personal life.
 |
| Johanna Yunker |
The answers are complicated: “Women in East Germany had a very unusual position [because of socialism],” Yunker explains. They had a “literary feminism… It was not about protesting or changing laws.” She shows how the two artists approached womanhood, feminism, and gender roles in different ways. Director Ruth Berghaus’ 1982 production of Les Troyens, for example, featured a strong female lead as well as a program that included exerpts from the novel Cassandra by Christa Wolf, one of East Germany’s most influential female writers. In contrast, Ruth Zechlin wanted people to think of her simply as a composer, not, as many people did, always a “female composer.” Zechlin said of her music, “To me it is entirely unimportant if a work was composed by a woman or a man. It just counts if the music is good or bad.”
Yunker spent a year in Berlin learning German, listening to opera and sifting through musical scores, newspaper reviews, photographs, and decaying VHS recordings of productions from the 1980s. Although both Zechlin and Berghaus have passed away, Yunker was able to gain unprecedented access to both womens’ personal archives through contact with their families. She has been able to digitize much in these archives to preserve them for future generations.
After she receives her doctorate, Yunker expects to teach music, and hopes to “continue [researching the] large cultural picture.” We shall be watching as she integrates feminism, culture, and art of the twenty-first century into her own professional and personal life.
Friday, May 18, 2012
FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor Spotlight: Patrick Wolfe
By Camryn Douglass
Patrick Wolfe is a professor of history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and an FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor for 2011-12 in May. We spoke with him a bit about his time at Stanford last week:
What are you working on while at Stanford University?
What I’m trying to do while I’m here is finish off a large book that tries to put fairly well understood histories of the American West in comparative perspective. I’m organizing established, known material into an understanding that puts settler-colonialism as the primary factor involved in the history of the United States West in the post-Gilded Age era. It operates with a wide time frame, and it’s already taking me much too long to write because I keep adding bits! That’s the problem with comparative work. It just gets more and more tempting to say, “Hey, let’s see if this works somewhere else as well, or doesn’t.” In which case, the difference can be interesting. I’m hoping to leave Stanford with a raw first draft of the whole thing.
Please tell us a bit about how your project started.
My study of aboriginal history and aboriginal issues led me to wider questions of colonial and racial matters. I encountered a lot of U.S. students asking questions about aboriginal issues in relation to civil rights, or in relation to Native American issues. Since then I’ve been thinking more and more comparatively, or perhaps thinking comparatively about more and more places. My work is centered on indigenous histories in Australia and the United States, but for comparative purposes I stray outside those realms to issues regarding African Americans, Afro-Brazilians, and Palestinians.
What is settler-colonialism?
Settler-colonialism is a form of colonialism that is exclusive. It’s a “winner take all,” a zero-sum game, whereby outsiders come to a country, and seek to take it away from the people who already live there, remove them, replace them, and displace them, and take over the country, and make it their own. As such it’s different from the forms of colonialism which we saw in, say, British India, or the Dutch East Indies, or somewhere like that, where foreigners went, and sat on top of Native society, and put it to work for them. In settler colonies foreigners come to eliminate the Natives, to get rid of them. Not necessarily bodily, not necessarily physically. Classically, there are assimilation policies which, rather than physically exterminating Native people, seek to transform them into white people.
In the U.S., reservations are a classic mode of eliminating Natives. They don’t get rid of them, but they box them up in a fixed locale, and that has the effect of rendering the rest of their territory available for settler use for the railroads, for ranches, for plantations, for mining, whatever, it may be for forestry. Another such technique would be the allotment policy that was brought in on a general scale towards the end of the 19th century, which sought to break down reservations into private lots owned by individual families who could, of course, then sell them off to white people. So, again, it’s not the straightforward physical violence of the frontier, but it has the effect of eliminating the Native people.
Patrick Wolfe will give a lecture on settler-colonialism on Thursday, May 24 from 3-5 pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. All members of the Stanford Community are welcome.
Patrick Wolfe is a professor of history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and an FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor for 2011-12 in May. We spoke with him a bit about his time at Stanford last week:
What are you working on while at Stanford University?
 |
| Patrick Wolfe |
Please tell us a bit about how your project started.
My study of aboriginal history and aboriginal issues led me to wider questions of colonial and racial matters. I encountered a lot of U.S. students asking questions about aboriginal issues in relation to civil rights, or in relation to Native American issues. Since then I’ve been thinking more and more comparatively, or perhaps thinking comparatively about more and more places. My work is centered on indigenous histories in Australia and the United States, but for comparative purposes I stray outside those realms to issues regarding African Americans, Afro-Brazilians, and Palestinians.
What is settler-colonialism?
Settler-colonialism is a form of colonialism that is exclusive. It’s a “winner take all,” a zero-sum game, whereby outsiders come to a country, and seek to take it away from the people who already live there, remove them, replace them, and displace them, and take over the country, and make it their own. As such it’s different from the forms of colonialism which we saw in, say, British India, or the Dutch East Indies, or somewhere like that, where foreigners went, and sat on top of Native society, and put it to work for them. In settler colonies foreigners come to eliminate the Natives, to get rid of them. Not necessarily bodily, not necessarily physically. Classically, there are assimilation policies which, rather than physically exterminating Native people, seek to transform them into white people.
In the U.S., reservations are a classic mode of eliminating Natives. They don’t get rid of them, but they box them up in a fixed locale, and that has the effect of rendering the rest of their territory available for settler use for the railroads, for ranches, for plantations, for mining, whatever, it may be for forestry. Another such technique would be the allotment policy that was brought in on a general scale towards the end of the 19th century, which sought to break down reservations into private lots owned by individual families who could, of course, then sell them off to white people. So, again, it’s not the straightforward physical violence of the frontier, but it has the effect of eliminating the Native people.
Patrick Wolfe will give a lecture on settler-colonialism on Thursday, May 24 from 3-5 pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. All members of the Stanford Community are welcome.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Everyday Comedy
By Camryn Douglass
Scene: After a swim at the beach, a man attempts to dry himself off while standing in front of a light post. He flings the towel around his back, inadvertently wrapping the towel around the post behind him. He pulls the towel back and forth (around the post, not his back) and is confused about why he cannot get dry. The man is frustrated and he goes home dripping wet. The audience shrieks with laughter.
This scene from Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulots’ Holiday may not be as grand as a house collapsing around Buster Keaton, but it elicits the same joy from the audience. Why? Because Tati has shown the audience a character they can all relate to. He is someone they could know, and the basic misunderstanding represented is a common experience. It is this mastery of the comic ordinary that first attracted the interest of External Faculty Fellow Malcolm Turvey who is examining Tati's unique comedic style for his upcoming book Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comic Modernism.
“Tati is interesting for a number of reasons,” Turvey remarks. “His first three films (The Big Day, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and My Uncle) were very, very popular with ordinary people. When they were released they did well in the theaters, and they’ve since gone on to have a long afterlife. On the other hand, he also cultivated a very challenging–some even say avant-garde–style of filmmaking. So he brings together this highly idiosyncratic, difficult, challenging visual and oral style, and combines it with the more popular genre of comedy. He exemplifies a trend in avant-garde art of the twentieth century, which is to draw on comedy.”
Hidden Comedy
Some are quick to relegate comedy to the category of mere distraction, but Turvey sees much more in Tati’s art. “One of the unusual things about his films is you always notice something new when you rewatch them,” Turvey says. “He deliberately hides a lot of the gags and comedy in his movies. He exemplifies this kind of larger commingling of avant-garde, advanced art, and popular comedy.”
After speaking with Turvey, it is very clear that Tati’s art of comedy is special. It is not simply gag after gag watching someone with incredible abilities entertain. Tati is trying to do something with his work. “If you watch a Charlie Chaplin film, Chaplin comes off as a very extraordinary person. He’s different from everyone else.” Turvey explains. “Tati wanted his major comic character, Monsieur Hulot, to be totally ordinary.” And herein lies the element of Tati’s filmmaking that makes him so unique among his peers: Tati did not shoot to be an outlier. As Turvey points out, Tati wanted to portray characters that you felt you knew–your friend, your uncle, your teacher. Rather than elevate comedy as a spectacle, Tati sought to make comedy accessible to everyone. He wished to “suggest that comedy is not something that only experts can do, but rather it’s something that anyone and everyone can be involved in.” He wanted to “democratize comedy, and take it out of the hands of specialists.”
Comic Modernity
Tati took special care to bring comedy to the masses. He took the emphasis off of himself, and invited a kind of participatory spectatorship. Other comedic directors tended to frame something funny in a close up, so the viewer is fed the joke. Tati, however, tended to avoid close ups and preferred that the viewer seek out the joke. He created an active experience where the viewer is largely dependent upon his or her own participation in order to get the fullest experience of the movie. If the viewer was not actively looking all throughout the scene, she would miss the joke altogether.
Why did Tati work so hard to layer his comedy and get the viewer involved? Tati wanted to “transform life in some way,” Turvey explains. “He hoped, I think, that once he’d shown you while watching a film how funny ordinary things can be, you would then go out into the world, and notice ordinary things as funny.” Tati hoped to teach the viewer to look for humor in everyday life. Perhaps this is one reason his films are so appealing. They teach us to look for humor, rather than wait for it.
Turvey also has another suggestion. Much of Tati’s comedy surrounds the failures of his character, Monsieur Hulot, has at fitting in to modern society. “The modern world is difficult for many people to live in,” Turvey explains. Tati’s films strive to show comedy in everyday life. They relate to a common struggle most people face. By showing us in films how to look for the funny parts of modern life, people can better cope with the struggles of living in a modern world.
See if you can find the hidden comedy in this clip. Hint: it has to do with a sock.
Scene: After a swim at the beach, a man attempts to dry himself off while standing in front of a light post. He flings the towel around his back, inadvertently wrapping the towel around the post behind him. He pulls the towel back and forth (around the post, not his back) and is confused about why he cannot get dry. The man is frustrated and he goes home dripping wet. The audience shrieks with laughter.
 |
| Malcolm Turvey |
“Tati is interesting for a number of reasons,” Turvey remarks. “His first three films (The Big Day, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and My Uncle) were very, very popular with ordinary people. When they were released they did well in the theaters, and they’ve since gone on to have a long afterlife. On the other hand, he also cultivated a very challenging–some even say avant-garde–style of filmmaking. So he brings together this highly idiosyncratic, difficult, challenging visual and oral style, and combines it with the more popular genre of comedy. He exemplifies a trend in avant-garde art of the twentieth century, which is to draw on comedy.”
Hidden Comedy
Some are quick to relegate comedy to the category of mere distraction, but Turvey sees much more in Tati’s art. “One of the unusual things about his films is you always notice something new when you rewatch them,” Turvey says. “He deliberately hides a lot of the gags and comedy in his movies. He exemplifies this kind of larger commingling of avant-garde, advanced art, and popular comedy.”
After speaking with Turvey, it is very clear that Tati’s art of comedy is special. It is not simply gag after gag watching someone with incredible abilities entertain. Tati is trying to do something with his work. “If you watch a Charlie Chaplin film, Chaplin comes off as a very extraordinary person. He’s different from everyone else.” Turvey explains. “Tati wanted his major comic character, Monsieur Hulot, to be totally ordinary.” And herein lies the element of Tati’s filmmaking that makes him so unique among his peers: Tati did not shoot to be an outlier. As Turvey points out, Tati wanted to portray characters that you felt you knew–your friend, your uncle, your teacher. Rather than elevate comedy as a spectacle, Tati sought to make comedy accessible to everyone. He wished to “suggest that comedy is not something that only experts can do, but rather it’s something that anyone and everyone can be involved in.” He wanted to “democratize comedy, and take it out of the hands of specialists.”
Comic Modernity
Tati took special care to bring comedy to the masses. He took the emphasis off of himself, and invited a kind of participatory spectatorship. Other comedic directors tended to frame something funny in a close up, so the viewer is fed the joke. Tati, however, tended to avoid close ups and preferred that the viewer seek out the joke. He created an active experience where the viewer is largely dependent upon his or her own participation in order to get the fullest experience of the movie. If the viewer was not actively looking all throughout the scene, she would miss the joke altogether.
Why did Tati work so hard to layer his comedy and get the viewer involved? Tati wanted to “transform life in some way,” Turvey explains. “He hoped, I think, that once he’d shown you while watching a film how funny ordinary things can be, you would then go out into the world, and notice ordinary things as funny.” Tati hoped to teach the viewer to look for humor in everyday life. Perhaps this is one reason his films are so appealing. They teach us to look for humor, rather than wait for it.
Turvey also has another suggestion. Much of Tati’s comedy surrounds the failures of his character, Monsieur Hulot, has at fitting in to modern society. “The modern world is difficult for many people to live in,” Turvey explains. Tati’s films strive to show comedy in everyday life. They relate to a common struggle most people face. By showing us in films how to look for the funny parts of modern life, people can better cope with the struggles of living in a modern world.
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